Othello: A Hawk among Birds
2004; Salisbury University; Volume: 32; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoIn their modern cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello, director Tim Blake Nelson and screenwriter Brad Kaaya remain very true to Shakespearian text-with obvious exception of language, as uses contemporary American English. Some critics, in fact, have noted that Nelson and Kaaya are too true to play to make film work in this age and medium. Peter Travers, reviewing film for Rolling Stone, notes, O relies on plot mechanics from Bard that make no sense in a contemporary context (116). Elvis Mitchell of New York Times echoes Travers's concern with context-in trying to make film contemporary for a younger audience, he believes, the adaptation has rendered material artless (E1). Amy Taubin of Village Voice has other, related concerns: It's simply impossible to accept that these are high school kids. That's particularly true of Hugo [the Iago character]: His skill at reading psychology of his pawns and his ability to delay his own gratification for what seems like an entire semester while he gulls Odin [the Othello character] bespeak a level of experience and self-control beyond that of any adolescent. (115) Taubin feels that elements of play do not work when funneled through consciousnesses of teenagers. She goes on to assert that had makers of been more concerned with characters than with faithfulness to Shakespearian plot, O might have been more than an unresolved mixture of gimmickry and good intentions (115). Certainly, there are both good and bad reviews of Nelson's film, but overwhelming concentration of negative ones, as evidenced by Travers, Mitchell, and Taubin, is that Nelson and Kaaya are too faithful to play much to detriment of film. However, this author argues that tragedy of Othello/Odin, now set in a South Carolina prep school, is a complex and powerful one owing much of its success to its very adherence to Shakespeare's ingenious rendering of human evil and jealousy. Nonetheless, true power of this adaptation resides in several carefully chosen departures from Shakespearean text, most notably contraction of Shakespeare's menagerie of animal images into a single powerful, unifying image-the hawk. In an interview that Nelson provided for DVD version of O, he enigmatically states, the point of film is pretty clear in its very concept. In other words, very fact that a Shakespearian tragedy, especially one as utterly dark as Othello, could be convincingly transplanted into a contemporary South Carolina high school is entire disturbing point of Nelson's production. Certainly other filmmakers-most notably Orson Welles, Sergei Yutkevich, and Stuart Burge-have successfully lifted Othello to silver screen. Other directors, like Nelson, have moved away from tradition to do so. In 1995, Oliver Parker finally cast a black man, Laurence Fishburne, in role of Othello (although Gordon Heath was first black Othello to appear on screen in a 1955 BBC television production1). Patrick McGoohan turned Othello into 1974 rock opera Catch My Soul, and Othello tackled Wild West in 1956 in Delmer Daves's Jubal. Nelson, though, is first to lay Othello in hands of mere teenagers. The fact that he could credibly do so is film's very meaning. Inherently, is a comment on dark and tragic behaviors that often plague contemporary high schools and timelessness of such primal human emotions like jealousy and rage. In order to truly make his point that message is in concept, Nelson adheres closely to Shakespeare's original text. As a result, there is virtually a one-to-one correlation between Shakespeare's characters and those in O, and those characters play out plot almost exactly as originally penned. Aside from language, however, there are several strikingly important ways in which Nelson and Kaaya stray from Shakespeare's text. …
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