A modernized retelling of William Shakespeare's Othello, O changes its setting to an elite private school in the American South. Odin (Mekhi Phifer) is the only black student at Palmetto Grove and also the star basketball player, with hopes of reaching the NBA. A popular student, he is dating Desi Brable (Julia Stiles), the daughter of the school's dean (John Heard), and they are deeply devoted to each other despite their different backgrounds. His best friend Hugo (Josh Hartnett) is a starter
on the basketball team, and the son of the hard-driving coach Duke Goulding (Martin Sheen), who considers Odin as much his son as Hugo. Hugo is jealous of Odin's widespread popularity, so he hatches a scheme to ruin Odin's reputation with the help of Roger (Elden Henson), his rich roommate who will do anything to be popular and get Desi's attention. Through carefully planned revenge, he begins to make Odin believe that Desi is carrying out an affair with teammate Michael (Andrew Keegan). As Odin begins to receive merely coincidental signs to prove it, he begins to slowly lose his grounding and turns to Hugo for help, not knowing that he is being set up. As the basketball season comes to a close, Odin's jealousy begins to consume him, resulting in the loss of everything he cares about the most. O was sometime actor Tim Blake Nelson's directorial follow-up to his well-received debut Eye of God. ~ Jason Clark, Rovi
This transferral of the tragedy of the Moor to a contempo American high school is something that never should have gone further than a class assignment to see if it could be made to work.
It's highly enjoyable and well acted, with the Iago figure better motivated than in the original play, no single line of which has been retained except for the odd echo.
Helmer Nelson has fashioned a clever premise, helped along by a smart ensemble that manages to highlight Shakespeare's work without parodying it--no small accomplishment.
Long on the Shelf, O is well directed and decently acted, but its narrative, while more or less faithful to Shakespeare, tried to do too much, pushing the characters and their emotions to unreasonable and unconvincing extremes.
Leave it to Hollywood to make a bold, challenging film for teens (and adults) only to let it collect dust on a shelf as proposed release dates were set, then scratched, many times over.
While O does contain some good performances and a creative sense of direction by Tim Blake Nelson, the film never really becomes anything more than a curiosity.
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