Beauty and the Beast
LOLITA
The new Lolita is a handsome companion to the other ones.
With Jeremy Irons, Dominique Swain, Frank Langella, Melanie Griffith
Screenplay by Stephen Schiff, from the novel by Vladimir Nabokov
Directed by Adrian Lyne
ADRIAN LYNE'S NEW FILM of the Vladimir Nabokov novel, Lolita, opens on a hazily verdant American countryside and almost immediately introduces us to the wan, fated, middle-aged Englishman, Humbert Humbert, whom we first see swerving his car down a country road, looking as if he were dead. And spiritually, he is: He’s lost the love of his life after begging her to take him back, and he’s just killed the man who stole her away three years earlier, when she was Humbert’s 14-year-old lover.
This is quite different from the way Stanley Kubrick began his 1962 Lolita, which was a near-macabre tragic-comedy about obsession. In Kubrick’s version, the regal James Mason portrayed Humbert, with Peter Sellers as the interloper Quilty, a brash and cagey master of disguise. In Lyne’s film, an unusually handsome, tanned, physically fit Jeremy Irons is Humbert, and Frank Langella creates a new Quilty who’s a sorcerer, an enigma, and maybe even the Angel of Death.
Both are exceptional films, not just for what they achieve - and Kubrick was surely limited by his era - but for even trying it in the first place: Nabokov is to many people unreadable and unfilmable, and to get two fine film versions from one dense, difficult, psychological novel is most exciting.
It doesn’t matter that neither Kubrick nor Lyne can penetrate the web of emotions that make up Humbert, Quilty and the nymphet Dolores - or as they call her for short, "Lo." Kubrick’s classic film, and Lyne’s modern one, can only explore (in different ways) the literal essence of an inner life that’s either tragic or depraved, depending upon how far you’re willing to go to forgive human behavior.
The plot of Lyne’s Lolita begins in 1947, in a quaint Midwest town that greets Humbert with a newsboy on a bicycle, an old woman waving from her porch, and a yapping dog that follows alongside his car. (These images recur in ominous ways.) He takes a room with a woman who turns out to be Charlotte He (Melanie Griffith), a transparently seductive Rosie-the-Riveter type with blush red lips and a flowery silk dress. Humbert immediately plans to leave - until he sees Lo (Dominique Swain) lounging on the lawn beneath a sprinkler, her moist dress clinging to her body.
And so he decides to stay, for at some level Lo reminds him of his first childhood lover, a girl he lost to typhus four months after their tryst. "Whatever happens to a boy at 14," he says, "can mark him for life." Thus Humbert’s appetite for Lolita is a most dangerous arrested adolescence, where passion and memory have destroyed his sense of judgment and reality.
He is, by his own confession, a madman full of despair because he can look into a school yard of girls and pick out "the little deadly demon" among them. "My sin, my soul, light of my life, flower of my loin," Humbert says of Lo, addressing his sardonic narration to a jury he imagines to be judging him. (Irons speaks these passa ges from Nabokov with a haunted, somnambulistic rhythm.)
Their life together (after Charlotte dies) takes place at first in motels across America. Soon they settle in Boston, where Humbert becomes a teacher and Lo enters prep school. The idyll doesn’t last long - and all the while someone is following them. It’ s Quilty, who first appears to Lo as a shadowy figure, his face obscured, with Lo on her knees in front of him, stroking his cocker spaniel.
Lyne’s visual choices in Lolita - his imaginative shots and camera angles - convey a peculiar sense of intimacy with the characters. There’s so much to draw you in that you almost need to see it twice to be sure you got all its nuances. The clima ctic showdown between Humbert and Quilty is like something from a gothic horror show. There’s even one wickedly funny, perfectly executed scene that gave me the biggest, loudest, teary-eyed laugh I’ve had this year.
Lyne’s sex isn’t explicit, but it’s often perversely erotic - and maybe a little incendiary, considering the subject matter. One Sunday morning, Humbert sits in a chair, having sweaty sex with Lo, who has mounted him but continues to read the funny pages. Later, when he begins to think she’s stepping out with boys, he throws her on the bed and rapes her, begging through his tears to know what she’s done. Lo - her lipstick smeared across her face - begins to laugh.
As intense as this might sound - and Irons’ performance is brilliantly layered with subtlety and flair, whatever the moment calls for - Lolita can’t get you inside the heads of its destitute characters. Maybe that’s impossible to do anyway, or maybe it requires a slightly better film than this one. Swain captures the physicality of Lolita well, but she has a monotonous voice and doesn’t always speak clearly, so some of her lines get lost. She’s good in the role, and I suppose you can’t ask much more of a teen-age actress, especially in such provocative situations.