Lolita
Reviewed
by Leonard Heldreth, June, 1999
Not only
does it take great courage to attempt to bring a novel by Vladimir
Nabokov to the screen but to attempt to adapt a novel that was adapted
previously in a film directed by Stanley Kubrick requires something
beyond courage—perhaps foolhardiness. Adrian Lyne (Flashdance,
Fatal Attraction, and 9 1/2 Weeks) attempts this feat, and the film
is not as bad as one would have expected. Nabokov's novel is linguistically
brilliant and savagely satirical—alternately pathetic and hilarious.
Told in the first person through the viewpoint of Humbert Humbert,
it chronicles an obsession that destroys the obsessed. Along the way,
it satirizes American culture, the American pre-teen, intellectualism
caught up in the pleasures of the flesh, and the hopeless pathos of
the pedophilia that it celebrates. When Nabokov presents the story
through the viewpoint of Humbert, he gives us not only the viewpoint
of the obsessed but also the very outlook and emotions that he is
satirizing. Film being the objective art form that it is, that viewpoint
is necessarily lost in both screen adaptations, and both suffer from
the loss. Further, the externalization of Lolita in the form first
of Sue Lyon and now Dominique Swain automatically removes her from
the idealized love object that so obsesses Humbert. She is seen only
through his eyes in the novel and thus attains the perfection he attributes
to her. In the films she is simply an attractive early teenager as
the camera reveals her to the audience (both of the girls, already
pubescent, are significantly older than in the novel). Lyne attempts
to give her the soft-core misty look of a David Hamilton photograph,
but it still doesn't quite work.
Lyne's film, like Kubrick's, is told in flashback, but
he begins at the end after the killing of Clare Quilty whereas Kubrick
opens the film with that brilliant and hilarious set piece in which
Quilty (Peter Sellers) is pursued by Humbert (James Mason) through
his rococo house and is finally shot while hiding behind a classical
painting. In Lyne's version Humbert (Jeremy Irons) pursues Quilty
(Frank Langella) through the house shooting him as they go while blood
spatters and Quilty takes refuge in bed. After the final shot, the
camera focuses on a small rivulet of blood. The later version is grosser
and bloodier in full color, and, while humorous in places, the scene
can't match the fine insanity that Peter Sellers generates as he plays
off against the fussy determination of James Mason.
Jeremy Irons' interpretation of Humbert is different from
but as good as that of James Mason. Irons is especially effective
in his wide-eyed adoration of Lolita, but he doesn't have Mason's
projection of deteriorating control, of the intellectual outwitted
by his mental inferiors and trying desperately to cover his tracks
and maintain his dignity. Melanie Griffith makes Lolita's mother more
attractive but still gauche in a slightly higher class; when Humbert
writes about the "Hayes cow," it's believable with Winters
but less so with Griffith. Frank Langella is a much more dissipated
Quilty; Sellers, while brilliant, always seems to be having too much
fun with the part to lose himself in it. Dominique Swain brings a
younger quality and a more childish spontaneity to the part than Sue
Lyon did; she's constantly chewing gum, taking her braces off, flopping
down with her dress above her thighs, and generally behaving like
a girl who is not quite sure just what her developing body may do
next or how she will feel about it. Yet in both cases, making the
girls older makes the crime less shocking. Even the seduction scenes
are pretty tame.
Lyne adds a flashback at the beginning of the film to
explain Humbert's obsession with nymphets: a girl he loved died when
they were both fourteen. Nabokov, who hated psychoanalysis and ridiculed
Freud's theories as simple-minded claptrap, would have sneered at
such an addition. As soon as a Nabokov character starts talking psychological
cause and effect, you can be sure the author is ridiculing him.
It is the language of the novel that makes it so disturbingly
funny—Humbert's pompous justification of his actions; the names
of locations such as Ramsdale and motels such as "The Enchanted
Hunter." Lyne keeps many of the names and attempts to establish
some visual parallels that pick up the humor. When Quilty lights his
cigar on the veranda of the hotel, the flare is intercut with the
flare of insects frying and igniting in the electrified grills of
the bug lamps. A shot of Humbert being manipulated by Lolita is linked
to a shot of flies caught on a fly paper. Lyne has used food for eroticism
in his earlier films, and here Lolita demonstrates her control over
Humbert by ordering an ice cream soda whose construction is lovingly
followed by the camera; no comment need be made about the number of
bananas that Lolita eats. However, no shot in the later film equals
erotic subjugation so well as the extreme closeup in the Kubrick film
of Humbert's hands painting Lolita's toenails.
While Lyne's film is slower, especially in the middle
section, it holds up well enough that one could make an interesting
week by reading the novel and then seeing the two film versions. That
should cure anyone of an obsession with pre-pubescent girls.
