Brother O, Why Art Thou in Prep School?

The trend on the screen towards the teen-fication of literary classics has become inescapable in the last ten years. Since Clueless in 1996, the teen-romance Beverly Hills edition of Jane Austen's Emma, we've been bombarded with the canon as seen through the eyes of the lovelorn adolescent. Some examples, in no particular order:

• 10 Things I Hate about You (1999) - a Taming of the Shrew update
  
• Cruel Intentions (1999) - Les Liasons Dangereuses by way of bloodless rich kids in NYC (I-berg tells me this was very much what his high school experience in Manhattan was like)
• Get Over It (2001) - some teen trash crap that is apparently based on Midsummer Night's Dream
• She's the Man (2006)- Amanda Bynes in a Twelfth Night adaptation
• Great Expectations (1998) - Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow phone it in for this Dickens classic updated to present-day New York.

This is not a distinguished list, I realize, and I'm not even including the Baz Luhrmann MTV edition of Romeo and Juliet or the Ethan Hawke oh-the-angst-of-modern-life Hamlet (in which Denmark is a corporation and the "To be or not to be" speech is delivered in a video store), both of which update the settings but use the original text of Shakespeare's plays.

I don't think I'm going to ruffle anyone's feathers even a little bit when I say that the 2001 Othello-remake O is far and away the best thing to come out of this fad for teen-styled neo-classicism. In this film, O is Odin James (played with legitimate depth by Mekhi Phifer), a black scholarship student at an elite east coast prep school, while the villain Iago is his classmate Hugo (Josh Hartnett). Both are players on the school's state championship basketball team - O is the superstar and Hugo is a mucker. Hugo is also the son of the team's coach, played as an insane-basketball-coach caricature by Martin Sheen.

As far as Hugo goes, O makes a stronger case for the source of his villainy than does Othello for Iago's. Whereas we recognize Iago early on as a Shakespearean testament to envy and Machiavellian ambition, care is taken with Hugo to explain his actions as those of a tortured, spurned adolescent, mostly through the attention that his father, Sheen, lavishes upon O, even going so far as to introduce him at a pep rally as being like a second son to him.

Sheen's character is the only piece of the movie that does not really have a corollary in Shakespeare's play. Other than that, the movie sticks pretty close to the plot development of the original. Desdemona is now Desi, played with wide-eyed, porcelain-skinned earnestness by that de rigeur inclusion of any teen movie, Julia Stiles. Cassio is Michael Cassio, another star player on the basketball team, and Roderigo is Roger, Hugo's chump. Brabantio, the Duke, is the president of the school in this edition, played by John Heard, the guy who used to play the broken-down cop that Tony uses as his own private eye in the early seasons of The Sopranos.

Almost all of the crucial plot twists from the play are incuded, right down to the fateful handkerchief. Hugo schemes to plant the seeds of doubt in O's mind by using Roger as his unwitting dupe and convincing O that Michael Cassio is sleeping with Desi. Race is present everywhere in the movie, as it is in the play ("an old black ram / Is topping your white ewe"), with one of the charges that brings O to the point of murder being that Desi and Michael together refer to O as "the nigger."

The climactic fourth-act murder of Desi is as moving in O as in any Othello production I've ever seen, but then the movie slightly hedges its bets in the end with O's dramatic final speech before his suicide, becoming more of a morality play on race ("I ain't no different than none of y'all... my mom's ain't no crack head, I wasn't no gang banger, it wasn't some hood rat drug dealer that trip me up... it was this white prep school m***f**** standing right there") than Othello's more honorable, and complicated, self-condemnation ("I took by the throat the circumsized dog / And smote him, thus"). But even then, the story remains plausible and powerful, eons removed from the high romantic twaddle of something like Cruel Intentions. O was an inspired idea that worked from start to finish, and I've always been surprised that it didn't gain a wider audience. The basketball is good, too. Mekhi Phifer - he got game.
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This post is part of our ongoing partnership with The Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival which runs from April 25 to May 26 right here in NYC.