LOLITA (1997) A Film Review by Ted Prigge Copyright 1998 Ted Prigge
Director: Adrian Lyne Writer: Stephen Schiff (based on the novel by Vladimir Nabokov) Starring: Jeremy Irons, Dominique Swain, Melanie Griffith, Frank Langella
Much ballyhoo has been made over this new version of "Lolita," made in a time when one would think that a faithful adaptation of the infamous novel could be made, over its use of pedophilia, and as such, it's important to address it straight-forwardly, before any other ideals such as goodness and themes can be discussed, as this film has been in film limbo for a number of years, lying around in vaults san a distributor, and having critics waiting to either hail it a masterpiece or call it anticlimactic horseshit. When seeing this film, after all the hoopla, keeping in mind that there are people, namely me, who are fans of the novel, who have been eagerly awaiting this flick since its creation...well, you just have to wonder why no one really picked it up for distribution.
What's even worse is that seeing this "Lolita," especially the first time and if you're familiar with anything "Lolita," is admittingly very anticlimactic. This is a real pity because when you really sit down to watch this film, ignoring all the crap that has preceeded it, it's really quite a film, perhaps the best film by director Adrian Lyne (although, really, look at its competition: "Flashdance," "Fatal Attraction," and "Indecent Proposal"), at least besides "Jacob's Ladder." I've seen this "Lolita" twice: the first time, I wasn't so blown away. It seemed overly dramatic and surprisingly unaffecting. The second time, not really thinking about how I've waited for what seems like forever to see it and how I'm seeing it on a TV set on a premium cable channel and not a giant movie theatre, it really affected me emotionally.
The story itself is a surprisingly heartbreaking one, which is why it's such a good novel, and why this is such a good film. The story of a pedophile obsessed with a young 14-year old girl named Dolores a.k.a. Lolita is great because it's not trash for the perverted but because it's about human obsession with things that are out of one's reach. Its protagonist, the comically-named Humbert Humbert, is not your average pedophile, but a seriously wounded human being who embodies how we are all destroyed by our sick obsessions and idosyncrasies. The character of Lolita is almost a symbol of the forbidden apple in Christian mythology, something that will destroy us but that we can't live without.
These ideas are all worked into this film nicely, but done in a way that is not heavy-handed at all, but instead lyrical and emotionally devastating. The focus of this film, and the reason for making it, it seems, was to really penetrate the emotional depths of the novel and bring them to life on the screen in beautifully dramatic images, and scenes which are blatantly over-stylized. The tone of the book is a comical one, but it's also a tragic one, and Humbert, telling the story from his perspective, blows every single thing out of perspective. Humbert exists in a fantsy world of his obsessions and desires, and this reflects the way the entire film has been designed. We get a sense that perhaps it's by doing this that Humbert has really trapped himself into a fate that will ultimately leave him haggard and destroyed. He weeps uncontrollably and never lets himself get over his original 14-year-old love, and allows himself to embody her as Lolita. He lets his feelings for her navigate all his decisions, and by the end, he has nothing but overly-dramatic feelings for her.
The story recognizes the extreme of this, almost out of a test, seeing if the readers will really sympathize with someone who is socially deemed a pervert, and one almost wonders while reading the book if the author, Vladimir Nabokov, wrote the book as a means to bring into focus his own sick obsessions, and perhaps bring them to peace. The weirdest thing about this film is that by the end, when Humbert has reached the finale of his obsessional journey, we can easily sympathize and even identify with him. The opening and final images of the film are the same, and who hasn't done a similar action, that is wandering about without any sense of reality or anything else but a deep sadness in us?
This is the second time the novel has been adapted for the screen, the first time being filmed in - shock - 1962, by Stanley Kubrick, who couldn't possibly have brought the novel to the screen with as much faithfulness as Lyne has been able to do, but did the next best thing: he economized for everything and came up with a droll black comedy about obsession in general. In that film, he used the traps of society as benefits. The studio demanded the final scene, that of a heinous murder, come first in the film so to portray Humbert first as a murderer and second as a pedophile...and when you see it, it gives the film depth of a man trapped by obsession. The censors wouldn't allow anymore than a couple glances and subtle dialogue to show the, um, relationship between Humbert and Lolita, so Kubrick decided to play it as comedy, but still allow the tragedy to seep through.
Looking at these two versions, especially after reading the novel (and we all know that when we've read a novel and see a film adaptation, we are bound to be angered by any size differences), it's really impossible to compare them. They both go for different things, and one has a lot more room to be as sexually frank as the novel was. And although it's true that several scenes are similar, and are thus up for comparison, overall it's unfair to say which one is better and which one is worse. I have never been one for saying the level of greatness of a film adaptation of a novel is deemed by how faithful it is, and I won't say that here.
However, this film is pretty amazing, mostly because hey, I loved the book, and this film nearly reminded me of it. It doesn't have nearly as much wit (a couple comical scenes, and even a lot of good chuckles, but just not totally witty), but it does have the same emotional toll that the novel had. Some of that is in the casting of the two leads. Jeremy Irons, with his deep, soft British voice and gentle look, is an amazing Humbert. He's droll in a very unique way, and, well, no one can look distraught the way he does. He brings a wonderful sympathy to the role that goes beyond pathos and really comes up as being easy to identify with the audience. And when he looks at Lolita with love, and she looks at him with lust, you know that he's her prisoner for as long as he lives.
And Dominique Swain, who plays the title character, is rather incredible. She pulls off the tough role even better than Sue Lyon did in the original, wonderfully balancing the qualities of seduction, bratiness, and self-centeredness that marks the character. It's easy to see why she surrenders to Humbert: she loves the attention, and knows that she can have her way with him at any time. When he denies her something, she blackmails him effortlessly (a scene involving a rocking chair and a little foot action is damn near classic), and when he stands up to her, she weeps and runs away, leaving Humbert to follow her.
There are two other minor characters in the film, one who's a road block in the beginning, and the other who's a reappearing threat to the relationship. The former is Charlotte, Lolita's mother, played by Melanie Griffith. In the book, Charlotte is a monster of a woman: overbearing, constantly scolding her child, overly-religious, and ultimately selfish. And she's the one obstacle Humbert has to overcome to obtain his goal, at least in the beginning. As played by Shelly Winters in the original, she represented all these qualities; as played by Griffith here, she's about half of them. It's annoying to watch a film and play a game where you try to see who could have done the role way better than the one on screen without mentioning the actor who played them first. And even though Griffith is not really bad, persay, she's nothing more.
The other is Clare Quilty, the writer who is also trying to seduce Lolita, and succeeds, but at a price. Langella takes a totally different direction than the one Peter Sellars took in the original. Quilty was a comic character in the original: a threat in the form of many forms, popping in states of rambling, German, proning, and eventually drunk. Langella takes the other route, allowing all of the creepiness to be unearthed, and the result is a character who exists in shadows and low shots, and who meets a wonderfully ironic ending, the exact opposite of what we thought of him.
As you can see, most of these are not improvements or mistakes done on the part of Lyne and his screenwriter, Stephen Schiff, but just parts of a whole new look at the novel, at least cinema-wise. This version is beautiful, and perpetually saddening. The camera movements are stylized, and each shot is breathtakingly rich. The acting is for the most part wonderful, and when we watch it, we really get a sense that for Humbert, who is telling the story, the only two people on earth most of the time were Humbert and Lolita. More importantly, it takes us right up the brink of emotion, then jumps right over it. By the end, with Humbert sadly driving recklessly in his car, following what he says is the only part of his life he doesn't regret, we feel that we all lose to something we can never have.
MY RATING (out of 4): ***1/2
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