MovieChat Forums > Othello (1996) Discussion > No Sympathy...

No Sympathy...

posted 16 years ago by gljbradley
1 reply | jump to latest

This is a pretty good film but why am I having this strange feeling that I don't feel no sympathy for Othello? Forgive me but this Othello seems a bit scheziophrenic, quick-tempered, tends to get violent, and a bit of an airheaded grouch. Again, forgive me. It's just an opinion.
Don't get me wrong, I love Laurence Fishburne and he did a good job. It's just that in this version of 'Othello', Othello is not exactly someone that you can understand and I thought that in a way, he was mentally unstable.

Any thoughts?

[–] Luanna255 15 years ago

It's okay!
Shakespeare tended to make his characters flawed and sometimes that does make them unsympathetic. I like it though, I wouldn't want to read (or watch) something which had 2-D characters.
Basically, the idea of a classical tragedy, the "formula" which Shakespeare followed, is that there is a "tragic hero" who is basically a good person but has one tragic flaw which leads them to make a huge mistake, which leads to their downfall. An example of this would be Macbeth, whose ambition led him to kill King Duncan. In Othello's case, the tragic flaw is his jealousy. He wasn't really schizophrenic or mentally unstable, but when he thought Desdemona was having an affair he flew into a jealous rage which made him unable to think clearly. This led to his downfall.
Ironically, the only one of Shakespeare's tragedies where I've never been able to identify the hero's tragic flaw is also the one where I sympathize with the hero the most, Hamlet.