“Hell and night must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light.” – Iago in Shakespeare’s “Othello”
Great plays can survive flawed film adaptations, if the actors rise to the challenge. The new movie of William Shakespeare’s turbulent masterpiece “Othello” is a variable achievement — sometimes powerful, sometimes awkward. But several of the cast members seize the day — including Laurence Fishburne, a sometimes astonishingly moving Othello.
Set along Venetian canals and in Cypriot palaces, above crashing oceans and in perfumed boudoirs, the film is an actor’s showcase for Fishburne and co-star Kenneth Branagh. Fishburne’s Moor of Venice — a mighty general trapped in the wily schemes of his malicious ensign, Iago (Branagh), a husband tricked into baseless and murderous jealousy over his wife, Desdemona (Irene Jacob) — is shown here as a man of stature brought low by treachery.
And Branagh’s Iago is a performance of hair-raising brilliance — but we could have expected that. Fishburne, in his first classical role, handles the part’s soaring poetry and terror-drenched psychological depths surprisingly well.
Pared to the bone (40 percent of Shakespeare’s text remains for the film’s two-hour running time), this “Othello” is refashioned into an Elizabethan erotic thriller, told from the villain’s viewpoint. As the “demi-devil” Iago spins his plots, entangling Othello, betraying his own stooge Roderigo (Michael Maloney) and pointing Desdemona toward doom, we’re caught in the schemer’s cruel, obsessive grip.
Jealousy is Iago’s own weakness; by the play’s end, he has infected a world with it. Initially nursing dubious suspicions about Othello and his own wife — and Desdemona’s nurse, Emilia (Anna Patrick) — Iago also boils with hidden fury because Othello has passed him over for promotion, choosing instead as lieutenant the less-experienced Cassio (Nathaniel Parker). Feverish with envy, Iago mounts a campaign to persuade Othello that Cassio is Desdemona’s lover and to destroy them both.
Adapted and directed by Oliver Parker, a 38-year-old veteran of Clive Barker’s movies and Barker’s Dog Theater Company making his feature directorial debut, this “Othello” has its shortcomings. It’s strong but obvious, visually fluent but plain. Well-photographed in sinuous blues and blacks, it still utterly lacks the pictorial grandeur and dazzling style of Orson Welles’ great 1952 movie version.
And the acting, despite Fishburne and Branagh, misses the group strength of the ensemble in Laurence Olivier’s 1965 stage-to-film transcription — with Olivier as Othello, Maggie Smith as Desdemona, Frank Finlay as Iago and Derek Jacobi as Cassio.
One role in Parker’s version is questionably cast: The French actress Irene Jacob, radiant in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Red” and “Double Life of Veronique,” may emotionally fit the loving, persecuted Desdemona, but her accent and phrasing throw us off. She’s a beat behind the others, especially Anna Patrick, who gives nurse Emilia’s final accusatory aria such searing focus that she dominates the movie’s climax.
And she’s a beat behind the stars as well. Can we believe, watching Fishburne, that he’s never had classical theatrical training, never played a Shakespearean role? It’s hard. Somber, moody, eyes glowering, voice cultured and gentle, robed in Grecian white, Fishburne’s Moor has dramatic assurance, along with a soldierly weight the role often lacks.
As one of the only African-Americans to take the role in a film, he easily mines the themes of racial envy and prejudice. (You can only guess, from recordings, what Paul Robeson and James Earl Jones achieved in their versions.) Fishburne’s physical presence, his rangy tattooed frame, suggests a warrior and lover who can’t be denied.
And Fishburne conveys Othello’s entrapment more movingly and simply than most of his predecessors; at the end, his eyes burn with shame and pain. It’s not a perfect performance; his breakdowns lack some terror and fury. But, when he succumbs to the provocations of Shakespeare’s greatest villain, “honest, honest Iago,” he gives us a real sense of a great and good man forced into a cauldron of madness by a malevolent genius.
It’s a tremendous acting duel. And, if Branagh has the edge, it’s not simply because he’s the more experienced Shakespearean (director and actor in many of the plays, filmmaker of the excellent “Henry V” and “Much Ado About Nothing” and the forthcoming uncut “Hamlet”), but because Iago is really the play’s best role.
Othello has supreme moments: trumpet-blasts of heroism, shocking scenes of dissolution and torment, and perhaps the most piteous of all Shakespeare’s magnificent death scenes. But Iago — the affable dissembler constantly protesting his honesty while he lies and his love for those he destroys — is a phenomenon: one of drama’s most thoroughly convincing embodiments of pure evil.
Branagh’s ongoing project to develop a new Shakespearean cinema is a heroic one — even if, as here, he’s not the director. And because he’s so steeped in the plays, he brings fire to the parts. With his gleaming blue eyes, near-constant smile, clean-cut demeanor and ceaseless protestations of friendship and goodwill, he’s an Iago who can charm us just as he hoodwinks Roderigo, Cassio, Emilia, Othello and all the rest — right until the moments when he turns, drops his good-guy mask and cold heartedly tells us what he intends to do next.
Branagh is fantastic at these asides, even when Parker goes too far and stages one of them during Iago’s bed romps with Emilia. Branagh’s masterly mixture of Shakespearean speech and modern delivery gives him total rapport with the audience, as if he took our complicity for granted. And when he talks to us, all Iago’s false warmth, geniality and base flattery drain away. As he discharges his venom and secret schemes, he is oddly subdued, betraying strong emotion only once, with the blood-chilling whisper in his first soliloquy, “I hate the Moor!”
Why? The movie clearly portrays Iago as a racist — or, perhaps even worse, as someone who coolly manipulates the racism of others (Roderigo and Desdemona’s father, Brabantio) for his own ends. But what are his ends? As the plot unwinds, we see that Iago is not the cool, adroit Machiavellian plotter he seems. Sick with jealousy, he’s being carried away on his own storms. Feeding his own poisons of envy into the greater-souled but vulnerable Othello, he’s caught in the whirlwind.
Critics have suggested that this new “Othello” has contemporary relevance because of the O.J. Simpson case — as if this timeless, wondrous drama needed a tawdry celebrity murder trial to make it current. “Othello” — like “Hamlet,” “The Tempest” and the rest of Shakespeare — is always relevant and alive.
In fact, it’s possible that Shakespeare, even though he wrote 300 years before movies were invented, is the cinema’s greatest scenarist. Where else can you find such richness, such poetic beauty, such dramatic fire, psychological depth and sheer overwhelming theatrical splendor? You can watch Welles’ “Othello,” Olivier’s or this one and still be stunned at the richness and darkness of the play, even if you’re aware of everything the adaptors missed. And, for all the movie’s flaws, when Fishburne’s Othello howls with agony or Branagh’s Iago smiles and hugs his victims, we’re caught in an embrace of genius and eternity.
”OTHELLO”
(star) (star) (star)
Directed by Oliver Parker; adapted by Parker, from William Shakespeare’s play; photographed by David Johnson; edited by Tony Lawson; production designed by Tim Harvey; music by Charlie Mole; produced by Luc Roeg, David Barron. A Columbia Pictures release. Running time: 2:05. MPAA rating: R. Language, sensuality, nudity, violence.
THE CAST
Othello………………………….Laurence Fishburne
Iago……………………………….Kenneth Branagh
Desdemona………………………………Irene Jacob
Cassio…………………………….Nathaniel Parker
Emilia………………………………..Anna Patrick
Roderigo……………………………Michael Maloney
