Movie reviews: “O”

Give thy worst of thoughts, the worst of words–Othello. Some critics have obliged. These are John Anderson’s in Newsday: “Bewildering, boring, devoid of motivation, incredulously acted.” These are Bob Strauss’s in the Los Angeles Daily News: “The movie is an abject lesson in just how far you can’t go to make Shakespeare contemporary and relevant for teenagers.” Some critics, to paraphrase a line from another Shakespearean play, are praising the film even as they bury it. Writes Jay Carr in the Boston Globe: “Talented young performers and a venturesome director throw themselves at Shakespeare’s ”Othello” with vigor, freshness, and conviction in O, but can carry this modernization only so far. The film collapses under the weight of the effort to shoehorn Shakespeare’s story into a context that ultimately doesn’t accommodate it.” But the film is receiving a surprising number of raves–particularly surprising since it was shelved for two years following the Columbine tragedy. (It is set on a high school campus and ends in violence.) Rita Kempley in the Washington Post calls the movie “a worthy, well-acted attempt to transform Shakespeare’s Othello into a tragic touchstone for modern teens.” Marc Caro in the Chicago Tribune defends the violent scenes that close the film and calls the production itself “serious-minded, non-exploitative.” Likewise, Claudia Puig in USA Today remarks, “O is disturbing, but in all the right ways.” And Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times concludes that O is “a good film for most of the way, and then a powerful film at the end, when, in the traditional Shakespearean manner, all of the plot threads come together, the victims are killed, the survivors mourn, and life goes on.”