OTHELLO
A film review by Christopher Null
Copyright 1996 Christopher Null
Seldomly have I been so outright disappointed by a film. OTHELLO's problems are numerous, and given the outstanding cast put together for the film (and an admitted masterpiece to work with), it's amazing that this film comes off as being so downright bad.
The story's been around for 400 years. Othello (Lawrence Fishburne) is a Moorish general in the Italian army, and he is the victim of constant prejudice. Desdemona (Irene Jacob) is his Italian lover, and when the pair secretly marry, Othello finds himself the victim of a fiendish plot by his servant Iago (Kenneth Branagh). Iago's motives are also magnified by the presence of young Cassio (Nathaniel Parker), who serves as Othello's right-hand man despite Iago's longer term of service.
And as with any Shakespearean tragedy, there are a number of misunderstandings and, as a result, *everybody* dies.
The prime difficulty with OTHELLO is the language. Dripping with archaic English, anyone unfamiliar with Shakespeare's original play is going to have a really tough time following the barest facts of the story. The truly sad thing is that the archaisms are largely not Shakespeare's. Rather, first-time writer/director Oliver Parker changed 70 percent of the play during his adaptation, in order to, I guess, make it much more confusing than it really is.
Other problems abound. Iago's motivation (in the film) is never clear at all, Branagh's acting here is pathetic, the very French actress Jacob is woefully miscast as an Italian speaking in English, and while the last 20 minutes of the film are pretty good, they don't make up for the first 100, which are just dreadfully boring. By the time the end finally rolls around, I was *hoping* they'd all die, and soon.
The few good points? OTHELLO's thinly-veiled message about racism is worthwhile, if a bit obvious, and Fishburne does turn in a great Moor. If he'd had more to work with here, we'd probably have the definitive version of the play. As it is now, it's just a lot of death in Venice.
RATING: **
\-------------------------------\ |* Unquestionably awful | |** Sub-par on many levels | |*** Average, hits and misses | |**** Good, memorable film | |***** Perfection | \-------------------------------\
-Christopher Null / null@utxvms.cc.utexas.edu -Movie Emporium (reviews) / http://www.notes.tpoint.net/emporium/ -Contributing Editor, FEEDBACK / http://www.eden.com/~feedback/ -E-mail requests to join the movie review mailing list
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews