A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Thursday, June 12, 2025

O (Tim Blake Nelson, 2001)

Mekhi Phifer and Josh Hartnett in O

Cast: Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett, Julia Stiles, Martin Sheen, Andrew Keegan, Rain Phoenix, Elden Henson, John Heard. Screenplay: Brad Kaaya, based on a play by William Shakespeare. Cinematography: Russell Lee Fine. Production design: Dina Goldman. Film editing: Kate Sanford. Music: Jeff Danna. 

Tim Blake Nelson's O begins with Desdemona's prayer from Verdi's Otello on the soundtrack, which seems to me like a misstep, reminding anyone who knows either Shakespeare's play or Verdi's operatic adaptation of it that they won't be hearing either the former's verse or the latter's music. That probably doesn't matter to anyone unfamiliar with those masterworks, which includes much of the teenage audience for which the movie seems designed, but it puts a heavy burden on it for those who do know them. Brad Kaaya is quite deft at sticking to the plot and characters of the play, however, and many of the actors are up to its demands. As Hugo, the movie's Iago, Josh Hartnett is a plausible schemer, and Kaaya probably didn't need to supplement the "motiveless malignancy" of the original character with a suggestion of 'roid rage, showing Hugo shooting up a performance enhancer. Julia Stiles's Desi is spunkier than the play's Desdemona, which presents a problem only at the end, when her character doesn't fight back as much as she might be expected to. But the casting to Mekhi Phifer as Odin (a curiously Nordic name) is the major mistake: He doesn't evoke the charisma and power that Othello needs, both in wooing Desi and becoming the tragic subject of Hugo's. Phifer is also a good deal shorter than Hartnett, which unbalances their confrontation. Still, if you're going to rip off Shakespeare, O does a better job of it than might be expected.  

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