Cinema: Taking a Peek at Lolita

Here's how the world has turned: the new movie version of Lolita is at this moment playing without any particular controversy in Moscow, former capital of hopelessly square Soviet socialist morality. After something like a year of relentless salesmanship, producers of Adrian Lyne's near reverent (but by no means inept or exploitative) adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's modernist classic has yet to find a theatrical distributor in the U.S., where, of course, morally ambivalent entanglements between older men and younger women have lately been hot news.

This irony was not lost on the director when he appeared last week at the first American public screening of his work, in Los Angeles, which was jointly sponsored by his union (the Directors Guild) and his agents (ICM). The film was appreciatively received, perhaps more as a civil liberties cause manque (you know how Hollywood loves those) than as a presumptive work of art (you know how anxious those make Hollywood). A couple of days before the screening, the press had reported that Lolita's backers were discussing a straight-to-cable release of their $50-ish million product with Showtime (you know how humiliating that is in Hollywood), so the discussion period turned into a "Let's get behind Adrian" rally rather than a serious consideration of the film he actually made.

It should be said, flat out, that Lyne's Lolita is not a movie we need to be protected from. If it offers a certain sympathetic understanding of Jeremy Irons' gently wistful Humbert Humbert, he is more than adequately punished for his nymphetomania. If Lolita, in Dominique Swain's marvelous performance--a mercurial blend of the guileful and guileless--is as much victimizer as victim, well, such creatures are not unknown in life.

That said, however, it's easy to see why so many distributors have passed on this Lolita, using as a primary excuse the constitutionally dubious 1996 federal law that prohibits showing sexually suggestive acts with children. But the commercial problem is not so much with the movie Lyne made, working from Stephen Schiff's carefully crafted script, as with the movies he didn't make.

To begin with, he didn't deliver an Adrian Lyne movie, something with the mildly transgressive, slightly trashy, hugely promotable edge of his Fatal Attraction or Indecent Proposal. All that, he seems to be signaling here, is behind him. He has shot Lolita in elegantly muted tones, and Ennio Morricone has given him an elegiac score redolent of the lost European world (and the lost adolescent love) that Humbert ironically seeks to recapture through his doomed passion for this child of a new world and new times (the piece is set in the late '40s, just after other children of the new world had, in a much larger sense, rescued the old one from its sins).