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The Reconstruction of Othello Many Shakespearean plays have been used by Hollywood filmmakers to realize thier own ideas and express thier own points of view. The text of a play is sometimes used as an exact script for the film and sometimes the text is used as a basis for the film but not an exact replica. A version of the play Othello written by William Shakespeare that appeals to the audience of teens is director Tim Blake Nelsons film under the short title O. He uses William Shakespeare's Othello as a guideline for his powerful movie about a rich white dominated school and a young black basketball star. Nelson uses many of the ideas from the original play in his adaptation but he uses these ideas in a more modern way in order to appeal to a younger generation.
There are many similarities between both the play and the film, but there are also some clear differences which lead to the idea that Nelson did not just want to copy the play exactly. He only wanted to use it as a guideline for a modernized story. There were numerous attempts made by Hollywood filmmakers to produce a high quality movie out of Shakespeare's Othello. The film Othello casting Lawrence Fishburne is the picture the latter will be remembered for. His powerful and furious performance as Shakespeare's betrayed Moorish general who kills his wife because of unjust jealousy is far and away the best performance of 1995. This film is directed by Oliver Parker, and it is everything Shakespeare is ought to be when put to film - articulate, concise, and visually striking because it really takes advantage of both The Bard's brilliant storyline and the films more personal connection with the audience.
Cut down from approximately four hours of the play, this two-hour movie still gives a full sense of time and events left out for the film by using some dialogue as voice-overs between scenes and montage sequences to explain that aspects not shown on the screen. In contrast to Orson Welles' 1952 Othello, which feels a little chopped up after two hours of watching, this film simply flows. Those unfamiliar with the play will not even be able to realize that something is missing. In recent years, a number of filmmakers have tried to re contextualize the literary heritage of William Shakespeare to more modern settings, in an attempt to make the authors work more accessible to contemporary audiences.
Among successful attempts there are Romeo and Juliet, in which director Laz Buhrmann transplanted the lovers into the middle of gang-war-infested Verona Beach, and Richard III, which managed to use a fascist post-First World War England as the setting very well. However, there have been a number of such interpretations that have not fared so well, such as Kenneth Branaugh's unsuccessful attempt to turn Loves Labors Lost into a musical of the thirties. Besides, last years slow and dull Hamlet, in which Ethan Hawke meditated upon to be or not to be in the action movie of a Manhattan Blockbuster store, is not a successful attempt either. Fortunately, the latest adaptation of Shakespeare's themes, O, belongs to the successful ones rather than the latter. Skillfully reinventing Othello on the basketball court of a modern-day prep school, the only tragedy in O is that this powerful film had been waiting to be demonstrated for two years due to the aftermath of the Columbine incident. Tim Blake Nelson's O, a modern-day retelling of William Shakespeare's Othello, has had a long, arduous journey to the screen.
Originally planned to open in the spring of 1999, it was quickly yanked from the release date following the Columbine shootings, an occurrence that O somehow mirrors in its high school setting. The film kept being pushed back throughout the rest of that year and well into 2000, until Lions Gate Films wisely purchased it, promising the understandably distraught Nelson that the studio would finally allow his work to be demonstrated on the big screen. While most motion pictures that are continuously pushed from release dates signal a lack of faith in their success, this is certainly not the case of O, which even won the Best Director prize at the 2000 Seattle Film Festival. Almost three years after its planned release, O has finally arrived to movie theatres. Frankly speaking, long waiting is not a very huge price for that success and appreciation it has received further. Lions Gate Films O, starring Julia Stiles (Hamlet, Save the Last Dance), Mesh Phifer (Shaft, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer), Josh Hartnett (Pearl Harbor, 40 Days and 40 Nights) and Martin Sheen (The West Wing) opened to a $ 6. 9 million four-day total at the box office and pulled down over $ 4, 800 per screen, the second highest per screen average of the weekend.
As Tom Ortenberg, President of Lions Gate Releasing announced, the opening was Lions Gates second largest ever after Dogma. William Shakespeare's plays reinvented as modern-language high school movies have become a mini-genre themselves in the last few years. This became a very popular trend in modern Hollywood filmmaking. However, such films were just comedies for an easy entertainment and calm rest. In other words, they were just for fun. Completely another story is about the film under a short and strange at first seeing title O.
Directed by Tim Blake Nelson, O is a modern interpretation of William Shakespeare's Othello. It is an instructive tale about seduction, jealousy, betrayal and the dangerous price of pride - all of which is discovered on the eve of the state basketball championship. In this adaptation, Othello and Desdemona both appear as Odin and Desi respectively. For that audience who has studied Othello in school, the plot mechanics of O will be very familiar. The tragic hero is Odin James, the only black student in the exclusive Palmetto Grove preparatory school. However, instead of being expelled, he is worshipped as the star player of the school's basketball team.
The love of his life is named Desi, who also appears to be the deans daughter. The coach of the school basketball team (Martin Sheen) considers Odin to be like his own son. He favors his star player, of course, virtually ignoring his own son Hugo (Josh Hartnett). Unfortunately, this appears to be beyond comprehension and actual plans of Hugo who resents the attention towards his teammate. Filled with jealousy and assisted by Desi's former boyfriend (Elden Henson), Hugo plans and accomplishes the downfall of Odin by convincing him that his girlfriend Desi is having affairs (in short, sleeping) with another student (Andrew Keegan). Thus begins Odin's downward slipping due to jealous rage, which ultimately ends in tragedy.
There are several similarities between the film and the play which help to develop the idea that the movie is mainly based on the play. The comparisons between the play and film are generally in the plotting used by Nelson in his adaptation. Nelson uses many ideas from Shakespeare for the basis of his film. In both the play and the movie, a black man is living in a white dominated society where he is of high ranking.
Both men are also very good at what they do. Othello is a great warrior and Odin is a great basketball player. Odin and Othello both fall victim to lies and deceit from their friend whom they believed. This deceit leads to murder and suicide. The murders and suicide that occur in the play also occur in the film. They happen to the same characters but the victims in the film are under slightly different names.
Race is also common between both. There are racial slurs in the film and passages in the play that put down black people. For example, in the film, Hugo tells Odin that Desi and Michael call Odin the nigger. In Act I Scene III, Othello speaks of his background and black people as being cannibals that eat each other, / The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads/ Do grow beneath their shoulders (Act I, Scene III, 142 - 144). There are also some similarities between the play and the film originating in analogies between such characters as Iago and Hugo. This is not only their names sounding alike but also the reason of their revenge toward the main character.
Iago has a deep-seated resentment towards Othello stemming originally from Othello's choice of Cassio as his lieutenant. In choosing Cassio, Othello passes over Iago creating a schism in Iago's loyalty to Othello. Similarly, Hugo's father, the coach of the school basketball team, vividly shows his sympathy for Odin and ignores his own son. This makes Hugo become jealous and want to revenge himself upon his primary enemy named Odin. The main similarities between the play and the Blakes film occur mainly in the plotting.
The differences between each are in the other aspects of the story. The differences between the film and the movie occur mainly in character names and setting. The characters in the movie are easily recognizable to the characters in the play even though they undertake slightly different names. The setting of the movie is in one specific place, that place being Palmetto Grove High School. In Shakespeare's play, the story takes place in two completely different places: Venice and Cyprus. Since the movie takes place in a high school, the characters must be younger in the movie than in the play.
Another distinction lies in the period of time between the creation of the play and the film. The time period between each is very different. Shakespeare's play is set in the distant past, the sixteenth century, whereas Blakes interpretation of it is set in the year 2000. With both belonging to completely different time periods, the weapons used by the characters are also very different. In the play, the sword is the style of weapon used by men during those times. However, in Tim Blake Nelsons film, a gun is the main source of murder for people.
In the play, Othello's raw emotion is caused by his confusion over the information he receives. Odin is much the same way. Yet his use of cocaine causes an outburst of emotion from him during a state slam-dunk competition. The language that is used in the play is also quite different from that in the film. The play is written in iambic pentameter and does not include any swearing.
The film uses modern day English but not a pompous literary language used in the...
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