Beyond O.J.

Parker, a first-time feature director who has played both Iago and Roderigo on the English stage, has taken flak for bringing some contemporary razzle-dazzle to the play. Indeed, he has cut some 60 percent of the text and replaced it with arresting visual imagery (as Orson Welles did in his celebrated 1952 version), and he has spiced up Othello and Desdemona's marriage with a nude honeymoon scene (as Welles, thankfully, did not do). Parker at least does not succumb to the temptation to film Othello as one of today's joyless, Joe Eszterhas-style "erotic thrillers," in which sex is linked inextricably with jealousy and violent death. In fact, Parker finds the rousingly good story that is at the base of Othello, and his adaptation is as vigorous, exciting, and natural (if not quite as lyrical) as Kenneth Branagh's recent adaptations of Shakespeare.

This is due in no small way to the participation of Branagh himself as the treacherous Iago. While Welles's Othello focused primarily on the title character, with the violence surrounding him portrayed as a manifestation of his inner torment, Parker's shifts the balance more toward the villain, essentially giving Branagh a showcase. Branagh's knack for making Shakespeare's dialogue sound like everyday conversation is all-important. In a stage-derived gesture that paradoxically makes the film seem less theatrical, Parker frequently has Branagh address the camera directly. In justifying his machinations, Iago comes to seem a chatty, witty, charming fellow, as diabolically clever, psychologically astute, and seductive to the audience as Anthony Hopkins's Hannibal Lecter. While his ostensible motive for destroying Othello's happiness is his jealousy over Othello passing him over for promotion in favor of Cassio (Parker has cut Iago's speculation that his wife, Emilia, has slept with Othello), his real motive seems to be the sheer pleasure he takes in manipulating others and confirming his cynical view of human nature.

Such an Iago needs a worthy foil, and he has it in Laurence Fishburne's seething Othello. It's hard to imagine that at this shamefully late date, Fishburne is the first black man (although the second Laurence) to play the Moor on screen, and it makes all the difference in the world. He seems to tower above the rest of the cast, and he certainly stands out in his pirate-like appearance: shaved head, earrings, tattoos. Fishburne makes him a man of fearsome strength, but also of surprising vulnerability. It is clearly this vulnerability that Desdemona falls in love with, and that Iago exploits when he hints to Othello that Desdemona has cuckolded him with Cassio. His jealousy tears him apart (and literally throws him into seizures), not because he fears losing power over his wife (like Fishburne's Ike Turner in What's Love Got To Do with It), but because he believes that everything he's held to be true is false.

That Parker has retained some of Shakespeare's most poetic dialogue is apparent in the way Fishburne trips over it in the early part of his performance. The language barrier is more problematic for Irene Jacob, whose Venetian Desdemona stumbles beneath a thick French accent (the rest of the Venetians, naturally, have English accents). As in her performances in Krzysztof Kieslowski's films (Red, The Double Life of Veronique), her expressive eyes do most of her work, but in a dialogue-intensive film like this one, that's not enough.

Some fine supporting performances come from actors who happen to be members of Parker's family. His brother Nathaniel (Wide Sargasso Sea) makes a noble, if somewhat clueless, Cassio. Nathaniel's wife, Anna Patrick, is a devastating Emilia, withering with proto-feminist scorn as she tells Desdemona that if women are false, it's only because they're emulating men.

Parker's Othello is more about sex and power than race or status, but there are messages present for O.J.'s America if one wishes to find them. That we listen too closely to those who would do us harm, that we resort too easily to violence; these are lessons that are, sadly, as true now as 400 years ago.

Click here to read Gary Susman's interview with director Oliver Parker.