Well and good, some will say. After all, Shakespeare was writing for a sixteenth-century audience with sixteenth-century concerns. Four hundred years have passed and a lot has changed. Who’s to say what sort of play he’d write if he were alive today? It’s an ultimately unanswerable question. Still, it’s interesting to note that, of all Shakespeare’s plays, one in particular seems to have stood the test of time: "Othello." While producers and directors keep themselves busy reworking "Hamlet," "Macbeth," and "Romeo and Juliet" (most recently, as a lesbian tragedy) to suit the tastes of contemporary audiences, they are content to leave the basic plot structure and character assignations of "Othello" intact.

Why do directors so consistently make an exception for "Othello"? Apparently, it’s because there’s nothing to be gained from changing it. Of all Shakespeare’s heroes, Othello — in the original, a Moorish mercenary employed by the regime of Renaissance Venice in its ongoing struggle against the Ottoman Turks — is the only one who is black (or, at any rate, not European). While I look forward to the revisionist production in which a white Othello is cast against an otherwise all-black cast, I’m not going to hold my breath. For many, "Othello" is the only play Shakespeare got right and this is because, unlike any other Shakespearean drama, "Othello" speaks to our contemporary political concerns, our bad conscience, our desire to overcome a history of racial injustice. For once, Shakespeare picked the right hero and, just as importantly, the right villain.

Which is why I was so eager to see O, Tim Blake Nelson’s up-to-date remake of the Othello story, released last Friday in theaters nationwide. It would, I hoped, tell me something about Hollywood’s contemporary fascination with race. In the event, I was not disappointed, though I was somewhat surprised. For while O cannot be understood except as a parable of contemporary race relations, its director, Nelson (perhaps best known as an actor for his role in such films as O Brother, Where Art Thou? and A Thin Red Line), seems to have made every effort to obscure this fact. The result is a movie slightly worse than it might have been: a timid, unimaginative, and strangely pretentious parable of contemporary race relations.

The plot of Nelson’s O differs from Shakespeare’s original in a number of minor ways. Whereas "Othello" was set in sixteenth-century Crete, O takes place in the present day at a boarding school in an affluent suburb of Charleston, South Carolina. In place of "Othello’s" eponymous hero, Nelson gives us "Odin" (Mekhi Phiffer), a promising black basketball player recruited for the school’s championship-winning team. The other characters are also lifted more or less directly from the original. Desdemona, Othello’s love interest, is now "Desi" (Julia Stiles, whose delicate pallor seems well on its way to winning her a career), the Dean’s charming and very popular daughter. Othello’s faithful lieutenant, Cassio, has become "Michael" (Andrew Keegan), and, finally, the infamous Iago, Othello’s treacherous confidant, has been reborn as "Hugo" (Josh Hartnett). The language has also been changed to satisfy contemporary audiences, which in Nelson’s hands means liberal doses of cursing in a sometimes stilted high-schoolese.

The story, however, remains basically the same. The film’s central character is Odin, at once the team’s star player and the school’s only black student. As the film opens, Odin seems to have everything going for him: an adoring girlfriend, Desi, athletic success, the promise of college scholarships, and wide popularity among the other students. Even the coach loves him — as much in fact as his own son (if not more so). And there’s the rub. The coach’s son, Hugo, is also on the team and burns with a fierce resentment of Odin, who seems to have everything that should be his own. Through a complex strategy of deception — playing on Odin’s social, sexual and racial insecurities — Hugo manages to convince Odin that Desi is in fact betraying him for Michael, Odin’s right-hand man on the team. Odin explodes in rage and, by film’s end, four students are dead, including our hero (which explains, by the way, the delay in the film’s release: originally completed in 1999, the studio decided not to release the film until now for fear that its depiction of high school violence would draw criticism in the aftermath of the Columbine and Jonesboro massacres) .

This is more or less what happens in the original as well. The difference between "Othello" and O is thus more a question of character than of plot. Part of Othello’s appeal has always been its ruthless depiction of social envy and natural hierarchy. In the original, Othello’s downfall, just as much as his power, derives from an innate nobility not shared by the other characters. His nobility is of the classical kind, a sort of fact of nature which makes him stronger, bolder and more direct than most men. But Othello’s nobility is also the source of his weakness and, ultimately, his downfall: having no need of deception, he is untrained in its ways and for that reason especially susceptible to the low cunning of Iago. Nelson’s Odin is also a noble character and, like Othello, stronger, bolder, and more direct than other men. The source of his nobility, however, is quite different from that of Othello. Where Othello’s nobility is of a metaphysical kind, Odin’s is cultural in nature. Odin, in short, is noble because he is black. His tragedy, to that extent, is not his own. Rather, it is a tragedy which is, at least by implication, common to all black Americans.

At first glance, Nelson’s film doesn’t seem to support this interpretation. Whenever the question of race comes up, it is either glibly dismissed (Odin to Desi: "you can’t call me a n----- ... only I can call me a n----- because I am one") or exposed as a non-issue (Desi’s roomate, Emily, in response to Desi’s accusation of racism: "that’s so easy"). Nor are any of the characters explicitly racist, with the possible exception of Desi’s father, the school’s Dean, who initially takes news of Desi’s relationship with Odin as evidence of rape. And Nelson himself has been eager to downplay the obvious racial overtones of his film. As he wrote in a lengthy article for the New York Times, O, like Shakespeare’s original, is "a story more about envy than about race, making it no less human, and all the more universal." Well, yes, at least as far as "Othello" goes. Nelson’s own film is a different matter. Throughout, Nelson defers to clichés of black masculinity. It is no mistake, I think, that Nelson and his writers should have chosen to cast Odin as a basketball player, a choice so obvious that it risks turning the film into a cartoon from the first scene. Nor is it an accident that the film’s soundtrack consists almost entirely of aggressive rap music (even today, it would be a stretch to imagine "Othello" scored to North African music). Finally, there are Nelson’s clumsy metaphors, a series of close-up shots of tightly packed groups of white doves busily cleaning their feathers as a single, black hawk looks on. Just in case we thought the coloring of the birds was accidental, Nelson drives his lesson home in the film’s final narrative voice-over: "they hate them [superior men like Odin] for what they themselves can’t be ... proud, powerful, determined, dark. Odin is a hawk. He soars above us — he can fly."

But the most significant departure from Shakespeare’s characterization of Othello comes at film’s end with Odin’s last words. In the original play, Othello’s final speech, which immediately precedes his suicide, is intended to lend the scene an appropriate air of pathos. Just before running himself through on his own sword, Othello reminds his audience of the services he has performed for the Venetian government, admits to his lack of wisdom, and then, in closing, refers to an event from his own past:

And say besides that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog
And smote him thus. (He stabs himself)

This anecdote, despite its apparent irrelevance, serves to explain the nature of Othello’s suicide. His suicide, Othello would like us to believe, is one last act of justice in a life devoted to duty and honor — in, killing himself, Othello is merely doing what he has always done, dutifully dispensing justice as a representative of Venice, even when that means punishing himself. Othello’s suicide, in short, is meant to be a final proof of his fidelity. The suicide with which "Odin" closes is something altogether different. It is a spiteful suicide. Though Odin’s last words are clearly modeled on Othello’s original, the spirit of these words is radically different. After telling the assembled students of his love for Desi and asserting his equality ("I’m just like you... my mother was no crack head"), he gestures to Hugo and asks them to remember him, after his death, as one who had been led to destruction by "this white, prep school [expletive]". This scene, in "Othello" and O alike, gives meaning to the tragedy which precedes it. But, again, these are two very different tragedies. In Othello, it is the tragedy of a man whose excellence in pursuit of honor blinds him to his own weaknesses and eventually leads to his destruction. In O, it is the tragedy (though I have my doubts as to whether it really is, strictly speaking, a tragedy) of a man whose excellence in pursuit of honor allows him to be fooled into becoming yet another sacrificial victim to white racism. For Othello, the fault resides in himself. For Odin, the fault belongs to society.

In a way, the film is worse for not drawing this moral more clearly. For years now, Hollywood’s treatment of racial issues has been numbingly didactic (think John Singleton: when we’re not being lectured about the SAT’s, it’s only because we’re being subjected to half-baked theories about the economic roots of criminality), ignoring the real complexity of race relations in contemporary America. With O, Nelson takes a step away from the didactic approach to race. The problem is, he substitutes nothing in its place. The result is a film which tries to be everything to everyone. On the one hand, it’s a film about race with all the usual suspects. On the other, it’s a film which denies that race is a relevant category in the understanding of contemporary social life. The result is a mishmash far more insidious, if also far less competent, than anything produced by Singleton. Race doesn’t matter, Nelson tells us. Race is everything, Nelson tells us. One can’t help but wonder — and fear — what Nelson’s target audience, today’s high school students, will make of it.