Some of the movie, admittedly, is labored. Minus the treacherous eloquence of Shakespeare's words, the business of the stolen handkerchief now plays like the hoariest of hoary devices. Yet the central triangle retains its racial-sexual ambiguity. Mekhi Phifer as the charismatic and forthright yet secretly vulnerable basketball star Odin, Julia Stiles as his devoted girlfriend Desi, Josh Hartnett as the weak and bitter Hugo, who out of a tangle of envy and self-hatred tries to bust their relationship apart – each actor plays their role adequately and so close to the line, you honestly would believe it is their true self. As the drama comes to its gradual boil, they reveal their emotions with utter openness as well.
“O” turns out to be something far more rare than another novelty spin on Shakespeare, It's a teen movie that jettisons all irony, inviting us to sink, with a feeling that feels nearly lush, into the drive and clash of its characters. Odin, the only black student at Palmetto Grove Academy in Charleston, S.C., is a superjock, popular for his slam-dunks and also for the casual charm of his off-the-court camaraderie. He's devoted to Desi, and though it's hardly a color-blind romance, the deep-feeling bond that they share, at parties and in her dorm-room bed, makes their relationship look like the essence of a youthful love affair. Phifer and Stiles ground the movie in their playful sensual rapport; they make adoration look sexy. Odin and Desi see each other's race, but mostly they see right past it.
Hugo, too, is on the basketball squad, and the fact that he's not talented enough to be a star is just one of his problems. He's the son of the head coach and he feels passed over by his father, who was responsible for getting Odin a scholarship and who treats him like a saint. Hartnett, in a daring performance, plays Hugo as shy, moody, and all too easily wounded -- a maliciously overdelicate James Dean who schemes out of impotence, coveting Odin's success with a poison brew of admiration and envy. Hugo is one of Odin's inner circle of chums, and when he decides to plot against him, you wonder, for all of his cunning, how his convoluted plan could possibly succeed. He seems outclassed at every level.
That's where the racial politics of ''O'' grow at once powerful and, to me at least, a little dicey for comfort. When Hugo tells Odin that white girls like Desi are ''horny snakes,'' he's playing on the paranoia about otherness that everyone in America knows. Phifer shoots bolts of accusation out of his wary dark eyes. He reveals the spectacle of intelligence working against itself: As Odin begins to suspect his lover of infidelity, the reality of his past -- the fact that he didn't grow up with these privileged white kids -- starts to overheat and bend his judgment.
The motivation is laid out with meticulous care, and Nelson stages one extraordinary moment of primal anger: Odin, his roiling soul stoked by cocaine, smashing the basketball so hard at a dunking contest that it shatters the backboard, much to the ignorant delight of the crowd. Yet the movie, from this point on, has little choice but to escalate Odin's rage even further, and the effect, in its very overstatement, carries uncomfortable -- if unintentional -- racist overtones. The violent climax of O that resulted in all the distribution ruckus turns out to be the worst part of the movie because in the context of a modern American high school, it turns Odin into a junior O.J. Simpson, a young black man whose civilized facade is merely cover for an intrinsic and bottomless rage. Unlike Othello, he withdraws, in his very vengeance, from the audience, and the movie, for all of its feeling, recedes from tragedy.
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