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United States · 2001
Rated R · 1h 35m
Director Tim Blake Nelson
Starring Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett, Andrew Keegan, Julia Stiles
Genre Drama, Romance, Thriller
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An update of Shakespeare's 'Othello' with a young cast, set in an upper class prep school deep in the American South, and centered around the school's star basketball player Odin James and his beautiful girlfriend Desi Brable.
Had Nelson and Kaaya been less concerned with following Othello to the letter and rather had pursued this love affair into uncharted cinematic waters, O might have been more than an unresolved mixture of gimmickry and good intentions.
The film is a plodding, earnest adaptation that strips the source of its richness and ambiguity.
The actors attack their roles with commitment (Hartnett’s understatement is impressive), but their fervor can’t hide the movie’s implausible, often confusing storytelling.
Every character fated to die in Othello meets his or her maker by the time the curtain falls on Blake's adaptation, which means the manicured campus of Palmetto Grove is left littered with slain coeds.
Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan
Essential to the success it manages is Hartnett's low-key, charismatic performance -- cool, withholding, compelling. The triumph of his insinuating Hugo/Iago is how plausible he is, how he manages to convincingly inject poison in so many minds without seeming to be trying.
Exceptionally intelligent and powerful contemporary adaptation.
Entertainment Weekly by Owen Gleiberman
To an astonishing degree, O gets the tragic Shakespeare mood, that somber stentorian passion born of hidden slivers of ambition and betrayal.
New York Magazine (Vulture) by Peter Rainer
It's a doomy dirge of a movie, in which the protagonists, or at least the actors who play them, aren't equipped to handle their outsize passions.
Miami Herald by Rene Rodriguez
What O lacks is a sense of spontaneity: Despite its contemporary dialogue and manner, the movie can't overcome a nagging aura of artifice.
Philadelphia Inquirer by Steven Rea
Stripped of its poetry, some of the devices of the tragedy of the Moor come off here as woefully contrived.
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