Lolita

National Review, Sept 1, 1998 by John Simon

*The second movie version of Lolita, directed by Adrian Lyne, had the nowadays rare distinction of being rejected by every distributor. But only temporarily. There have been special screenings, a brief run in L.A., and airings on Showtime, which will release the film next month. The subject of Vladimir Nabokov's famous novel is pedophilia, of which our society is more frightened than of anything else. Even so, a serious film from a major work of fiction should not be banned.

Clearly the big problem here is how to deal with the sexual relations of the middle-aged professor Humbert Humbert and his 12-year-old beloved. In 1962, Stanley Kubrick cast a 15-year-old, and showed us no real sex. Lyne's Lolita was also 15, and there is one quick, fuzzy bedroom scene in which you can make out virtually nothing, and where a presumably older body double stands, or reclines, in for Dominique Swain, then a sophomore at Malibu High. Not much for the prurient here.

But, obviously, Lyne had to have sensuality. Since about the only flesh he could safely show was the girl's legs and feet, the almost always barefoot Lolita, using her feet as suggestively as possible, would be a foot fetishist's dream, except that her feet aren't particularly pretty. Otherwise, Miss Swain is fetching at moments, less so at others, and, except for somewhat overdone brattiness, handles herself well. However, she is not a true nymphet, Nabokov's famed term for a baby seductress. The ideal Lolita would have been poor little JonBenet Ramsey, had she been a bit older and not been killed.

As Lolita's mother, the man-and-culture-hungry Charlotte Haze, Melanie Griffith would be fine if she could erase Kubrick's Shelley Winters from memory. The deliberately scarcely seen (until the end) Clare Quilty, who steals Lolita from Humbert is well acted by Frank Langella, a specialist in cool loathsomeness.

The big mistake was casting Jeremy Irons as Humbert. Irons has become progressively more decomposed with every appearance, and is now suited only for a literal-minded interpretation of Tolstoy's The Living Corpse. In films such as Stealing Beauty and Chinese Box, he refined cadaverousness into a high, or at least vertical, art, and by now his head looks like a moldy, greying aubergine, with plasticine features stuck on and a quavery British accent piped in. His every performance lays, if not an egg, an eggplant. Humbert is a tragicomic figure, with James Mason, for Kubrick, getting both the tragic and the comic dead right; Irons gets only the lugubrious and the ludicrous.

Stephen Schiff's screenplay is a decent simplification of Nabokov's baroque excesses, which barely stand up on the page and could not even be approximated on the screen. Lyne and Schiff had the sense to preserve much of the satire on America's road-and-motel culture, which may be the novel's best part. The old master, Ennio Morricone, has composed some nice music, though less good than what he could muster as a young master. Howard Atherton's cinematography neatly captures both the strident and the lulling about the American landscape, and minor roles are effectively taken.

But Lyne's direction predictably fails in what could have been the subtler moments, and laughably overdoes the hospital scene in which Humbert discovers Lolita's abduction. Only the grotesque murder of Quilty entirely suits his souped-up style. Finally, though, the novel itself, its sensationalism faded, proves overwritten, pretentious, showoffy, and self-indulgent. For the problems of Nabokov the man, check out "Vlad the Impaler" in New York (August 3), where John Leonard raises all the right questions.