Let's try something original; talk about this film without mentioning Nabokov or Kubrick. Impossible? Probably. But cinema owes no respect to literature, so let's meet Lyne on his own terms.
Plot: rather dull. The Humbert/Quilty confrontation is necessarily muffled. Actually, I can't keep this up. This LOLITA doesn't exist in its own right: it suffocates in the shadows of its predecessors. The whole point of the novel (NOT AGAIN. GROAN...) was a mocking of ideas of 'plot' and character. Humbert is a madman (he confesses to many stays at 'sanatoriums' (sic?)), supposedly dying in prison, who manages, in a first draft, to create a work of polished beauty and perfect artistry. Yeah right. He is constantly playing games with the reader, with Nabokov playing further games on him and us. Whole passages, of seemingly vital plot importance, are undermined by parody, pastiche, allusion, word-games. The vital final clash is played as hysterical farce, as is much of the book.
How on earth do you capture this on film? Kubrick ignored much of the (untranslatable) book to created a masterly black comedy, which forswore Humbert's mendacious viewpoint in favour of Nabokov's more detached eye (funny how the hyperintelligent Vlad failed to notice this). It is, however, primarily a Kubrickian work, with the source material serving as a blueprint for many of the director's favourite themes, especially the idea of a moral monster as point of audience identification in his struggle with a repressive society.
Lyne, rather facilely, thinks that because Kubrick did not stick to the letter of the book, that he somehow betrayed it. His film is therefore superficially authentic - we are back in 'real' America, not Kubrick's English invention (which actually transliterated very well the book's themes of appearance, pastiche, deception and reproduction). But throwing in a few 40s signifiers does not a sense of time and locale make, and Lyne completely fails to grasp Nabokov's use and subversion and understanding of popular culture, as one of the two forces shaping Lo.
The major impression one gets from the book is the sweltering heat, the 'haze' (also Lo's surname), and this too is faithfully reproduced. But this only serves to make realistic a novel which is always rupturing into the fantastic. Lyne makes the fatal error of taking Humbert at his word. The glorious mixture of wild, disturbing farce and poignant melancholy of the book, is seriously unbalanced by almost completely obliterating the former, and drowning the film in the latter.
Yes, we sympathise with Humbert, but he's a fiend - he has sex with pubescent girls; he enjoys his mastery and their pain; he tries to murder Charlotte, and only fails because he is too timid; he drugs Lo so that he can sleep with her unawares; the money he so generously offers her at the end was hers anyway, through her mother. I mention these examples because they are suppressed in the film, as it tries to make of Humbert a tragic figure. This is helped by the fact that Dominique Swain, wonderful nymphet that she is (although the ideal Lolita is surely Shirley Temple), is far too old, tall and beautiful for Lo: in an age where Catherine Zeta Jones and Sean Connery are a viable box-office item, there doesn't seem to be anything all that distasteful about the relationship.
And so the film is actually profoundly scared of the book, not daring to make us sympathise with an absolute monster. The casting of Jeremy Irons conspires in this. He is superb, his best since DEAD RINGERS, but he is not Humbert, he has no madness, no poetry; more like Charles Ryder twenty years on. James Mason specialised in suave lunatics, and his perceived 'coldness' is a perfect interpretation of Nabokov's Humbert, as opposed to Humbert's self-image.
This LOLITA is as safe as can be - there is hardly any sex at all (I mean, we wouldn't want to offend anyone, would we?); the style is glossy and fatuous, TV-movie blandness, abandoning Nabokov's figurative language, and offering none of its own. The detailed descriptions of landscape in the novel have an untranslatable moral import: Lyne gives us a few blurry shots of trees.
The film is such a mockery of Nabokov that when we do get unimaginatively large chunks from the novel, they actually, unbelievably, sound daft. The Quilty climax, one of the funniest scenes in literature, and perfect in the Kubrick (with Sellers: how could it not be?) is reduced to FATAL ATTRACTION-style psychodrama (Nabokov, even beyond the grave, was spot on about modern cinema). Once again, Lo's anguish, in the hands of a 'sensitive' male (Lyne), is reduced to hysteria.
Very sporadically, there are moments of cheeky Nabokovian farce (especially when Humbert checks that Charlotte is asleep, and the interviews with Lo's principal), but the Nabokov tone is never caught, the sense of cartoon, non-sequitur, and sheer charming Humbert bull, is rejected as not being highbrow enough. By trying to be so serious, the film ends up looking silly.
Plot: rather dull. The Humbert/Quilty confrontation is necessarily muffled. Actually, I can't keep this up. This LOLITA doesn't exist in its own right: it suffocates in the shadows of its predecessors. The whole point of the novel (NOT AGAIN. GROAN...) was a mocking of ideas of 'plot' and character. Humbert is a madman (he confesses to many stays at 'sanatoriums' (sic?)), supposedly dying in prison, who manages, in a first draft, to create a work of polished beauty and perfect artistry. Yeah right. He is constantly playing games with the reader, with Nabokov playing further games on him and us. Whole passages, of seemingly vital plot importance, are undermined by parody, pastiche, allusion, word-games. The vital final clash is played as hysterical farce, as is much of the book.
How on earth do you capture this on film? Kubrick ignored much of the (untranslatable) book to created a masterly black comedy, which forswore Humbert's mendacious viewpoint in favour of Nabokov's more detached eye (funny how the hyperintelligent Vlad failed to notice this). It is, however, primarily a Kubrickian work, with the source material serving as a blueprint for many of the director's favourite themes, especially the idea of a moral monster as point of audience identification in his struggle with a repressive society.
Lyne, rather facilely, thinks that because Kubrick did not stick to the letter of the book, that he somehow betrayed it. His film is therefore superficially authentic - we are back in 'real' America, not Kubrick's English invention (which actually transliterated very well the book's themes of appearance, pastiche, deception and reproduction). But throwing in a few 40s signifiers does not a sense of time and locale make, and Lyne completely fails to grasp Nabokov's use and subversion and understanding of popular culture, as one of the two forces shaping Lo.
The major impression one gets from the book is the sweltering heat, the 'haze' (also Lo's surname), and this too is faithfully reproduced. But this only serves to make realistic a novel which is always rupturing into the fantastic. Lyne makes the fatal error of taking Humbert at his word. The glorious mixture of wild, disturbing farce and poignant melancholy of the book, is seriously unbalanced by almost completely obliterating the former, and drowning the film in the latter.
Yes, we sympathise with Humbert, but he's a fiend - he has sex with pubescent girls; he enjoys his mastery and their pain; he tries to murder Charlotte, and only fails because he is too timid; he drugs Lo so that he can sleep with her unawares; the money he so generously offers her at the end was hers anyway, through her mother. I mention these examples because they are suppressed in the film, as it tries to make of Humbert a tragic figure. This is helped by the fact that Dominique Swain, wonderful nymphet that she is (although the ideal Lolita is surely Shirley Temple), is far too old, tall and beautiful for Lo: in an age where Catherine Zeta Jones and Sean Connery are a viable box-office item, there doesn't seem to be anything all that distasteful about the relationship.
And so the film is actually profoundly scared of the book, not daring to make us sympathise with an absolute monster. The casting of Jeremy Irons conspires in this. He is superb, his best since DEAD RINGERS, but he is not Humbert, he has no madness, no poetry; more like Charles Ryder twenty years on. James Mason specialised in suave lunatics, and his perceived 'coldness' is a perfect interpretation of Nabokov's Humbert, as opposed to Humbert's self-image.
This LOLITA is as safe as can be - there is hardly any sex at all (I mean, we wouldn't want to offend anyone, would we?); the style is glossy and fatuous, TV-movie blandness, abandoning Nabokov's figurative language, and offering none of its own. The detailed descriptions of landscape in the novel have an untranslatable moral import: Lyne gives us a few blurry shots of trees.
The film is such a mockery of Nabokov that when we do get unimaginatively large chunks from the novel, they actually, unbelievably, sound daft. The Quilty climax, one of the funniest scenes in literature, and perfect in the Kubrick (with Sellers: how could it not be?) is reduced to FATAL ATTRACTION-style psychodrama (Nabokov, even beyond the grave, was spot on about modern cinema). Once again, Lo's anguish, in the hands of a 'sensitive' male (Lyne), is reduced to hysteria.
Very sporadically, there are moments of cheeky Nabokovian farce (especially when Humbert checks that Charlotte is asleep, and the interviews with Lo's principal), but the Nabokov tone is never caught, the sense of cartoon, non-sequitur, and sheer charming Humbert bull, is rejected as not being highbrow enough. By trying to be so serious, the film ends up looking silly.