Shakespeare's Othello has never really moved me, but it has always fascinated me. It's not that I don't feel compassion for the story of a black dude offing his white chick in the throes of petty jealousy; it's just that it's all engineered by Iago--possibly the most mesmerizing villain in dramatic history. So powerful, even omnipotent is his influence, his power hardly seems real, and since this element that controls the play's outcome, the tragedy it sparks hardly seems real either. It's like Iago is the mad scientist, and Desdemona and Othello are his chemicals. You don't feel a lot of empathy for chemicals, but damn--it's fun to watch 'em blow up.

There's also fun to be had in Tim Blake Nelson's O, an update of the classic play that places the action smack in the middle of an American suburban high school. This is no longer Shakespeare's fantastical Venice; it's Columbine country. It's Kip Kinkel country. It's America, and Othello's theme of pointless violence feels a tad weightier than it once did--to say the least.

Nelson has, rather ingeniously, replaced the military ranking system that causes so much strife in Othello with the complicated politics that govern a high school basketball court. Othello has become Odin James (Mekhi Phifer), an All-American point guard, and the only black person at a prep school in the deep South. Desdemona has become his devoted girlfriend, Desi Brable (Julia Stiles), and Iago is now Hugo (Josh Hartnett), the teammate who is most jealous of Odin's abilities. Hugo is the pent-up kid who has become quite familiar to American audiences in this day and age. We recognize him as the loner, the brooder. The kid who could either be really shy or who could come to school with a loaded weapon in his pocket.

So complete a character is Hugo, and so enamored with him is the director, that he has actually switched the story's perspective from Odin to Hugo. In Othello, Iago is a dabbler who takes control of the main characters' lives. In O, Hugo is the main character. Hugo is even given a back-story, a motivation to explain why he does what he does. Nelson achieves this by adding a character that does not have a parallel in Othello--Hugo's dad, and his and Odin's coach, Coach Goulding. Hugo yearns for his father's admiration, but his father has long since transferred it to the kid who deserves it more: Odin James.

With the addition of Goulding, Nelson has turned Iago's parallel from a god-like bad guy into something equally stunning: a human being we care about, even in the wake of his own sadistic chaos.