U.S. debut of 'Lolita' paints novel landscape

An antique American automobile swerves across an empty country road. The driver, attired in a black trench coat, covered in blood, and fingering a blood-soaked revolver, stares vacantly at the landscape. Then comes the narrator's voice. It is weary and at the same time pained. The tale will be a tragedy, and it will be heartbreaking.

COURTESY SHOWTIME

These scenes open the new film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, which, after not finding a U.S. film distribution company for several years, arrived in this country last month via Showtime Entertainment. Many companies feared backing the film because it depicts the emotional and sexual relationship between a middle-aged European professor and an adolescent American girl (Lolita). The protagonist, Humbert Humbert, is a pedophile who marries Lolita's mother with the intention of seducing his new step-daughter. When the mother suddenly dies, Humbert conceals her death from Lolita and travels with her as his child-bride across the U.S.

Adrian Lyne's film adaptation of Lolita is a visually stunning work. From the start, Lyne seems interested in telling the story through pictures. He leaves the viewer with a mental photo album of still shots, and the intentionally monochromatic composition preserves the mood of each scene well.

One might argue that Lyne's adept use of contrast and silhouettes, along with careful slow motion and altered lens techniques, mirrors Nabokov's prodigious allusions, puns, and wordplay in a formal translation from novel to film (literature is conspicuously absent from this Lolita). One might argue this if Lyne had not stated his goal specifically in these terms in a recent interview: "I really didn't want to remake [Stanley Kubrick's] movie. I wanted to make the novel. And however much you like Kubrick's movie, I don't think it had a great deal to do with Nabokov's novel." Neither does Lyne's.

Lyne and screenwriter Stephen Schiff have chosen to concentrate on the tragedy of Humbert Humbert's obsessive love for the nymphette Dolores Haze. In an interview with Showtime, Schiff said, "I think that we were trying to tell a romantic love story about a very odd couple...a very, sort of, misbegotten couple. A couple that should never have been, and yet was." Lyne's Lolita is a translation of Nabokov's novel, and that is how it should be viewed. His translation, however, is of not the words, but the story. Lyne's language is undoubtedly film, and when he strays too far from it, he fails.

The movie's success in portraying the couple is due, in large part, to the performance of Dominique Swain, the 15-year-old actress whose casting in the film is still causing controversy several years after the film's completion. It might disturb the viewer to watch Swain in Lolita's more erotic and sexual moments. But as the film progresses, Swain increasingly embodies the character irreparably damaged by the events of her life. Her Lolita is both pitiful and adorable, both playful and lethargic. We can feel her trying to hold on to the childhood that Humbert stole from her.

Jeremy Irons plays a handsome, brooding Humbert Humbert, a character whose ability to evoke sympathy is both alarming and despicable. His obsessive love for the adolescent Lolita becomes his most endearing quality, causing the viewer to lose sight of the fact that the tale is Lolita's tragedy, not Humbert's. We forget that this is the monster who plotted (though never carried through) the murder of Lolita's mother, played by a restrained Melanie Griffith, who is too thin and too attractive for the role. It is not until the final scene that we get a picture of Humbert's explosive temperament and potentially violent disposition.

That Nabokov's Humbert simultaneously repulses and wrenches sympathy is a miracle of modern literature. In his adaptation, Lyne chooses to portray this contradiction in the character of Claire Quilty, played by Frank Langella. The reader of Nabokov's novel may remain unaware that such a character even exists before the penultimate episode; until then, Nabokov sustains the possibility that Quilty may be a figment of Humbert's paranoid imagination. The film, on the other hand, portrays Quilty as a preternatural demon, hidden by shadows and enveloped in smoke. He is an alternate Humbert, devoid of love or conscience--and, of course, the audience's sympathy.

There is little comedy in the film because most of Nabokov's humor is literary humor. Lyne includes some inside jokes for those familiar with the novel -- the Enchanted Hunters motif, repetition of the number 342, etc. But the movie is most memorable for what it recreates: Lolita's powerful slow motion leap into Humbert's arms before leaving for camp, Humbert's mad and violent revenge for her abduction, and the sweeping American landscape evoked through the use of popular music. Lyne's is not an accurate reproduction of the novel, but is admirable and enjoyable.

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