Othello movie review & film summary (1995)
That leaves Irene Jacob, as Desdemona, to complete the film's catalog of characters at right angles to one another. Jacob is a wonderful actress, as anyone who remembers Krzysztof Kieslowski's "The Double Life of Veronique" or "Red" will recall. But she is appearing here in a play by Shakespeare, whose language is so crucial that the scholar Harold Bloom makes a show of preferring his Shakespeare in text readings rather than stage performances. Irene Jacob, who is Swiss, is not at home in English, and certainly not at home in Shakespeare, although she finds a heartbreaking physical gesture at the moment she is being smothered by Othello: Her hand reaches out to caress him.
Fishburne is much better, but not truly at ease, although I wonder if he might not have been more impressive if he'd been allowed the full reach and texture of Shakespeare's prose. Parker's adaptation slices and dices the original until the movie almost could have been based on the "Othello" pages from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. With the time he saves, Parker gives us a distractingly modern soft-core sex scene and montages that summarize offstage action that the play itself is hardly concerned with. Even worse are scenes where characters talk unheard under the music on the soundtrack; no composer - no, not even Charlie Mole - can improve on Shakespeare.
Kenneth Branagh has had great success with his own films of Shakespeare ("Henry V" and "Much Ado About Nothing"). He is currently at work on a "Hamlet" that will star Robin Williams and Billy Crystal - as Rosencranz and Guildenstern, I hope, not Hamlet and Polonius. He has toured in Shakespeare and is a master of the cadence of the words, so his ease in the dialogue acts as a contrast to the others.
His readings are diabolical and fiery, but do not, as I've suggested, seem focused on Othello.
The result is a movie that will not give its viewers much of an idea of the Shakespeare play, and may inadvertently give them other ideas, about interracial love, that were not much on Shakespeare's mind. Many people seeing this film will read it as the story of a jealous black man who wins but cannot trust his white wife, and so kills her. There is a lot more to it than that. In particular, there is the way Shakespeare uses language to describe and dramatize universal human weaknesses; either the audience thinks, "There, but for the grace of God, go we," or the production has not worked. Read the play.
