Cinema: Taking a Peek at Lolita

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The other movie he didn't make--or, rather, remake--is Stanley Kubrick's 1962 Lolita. The French critics, who guard film history as if it were every bit as important as literary tradition, have been all over Lyne, even though Kubrick has virtually disowned his movie because, subvert it though he brilliantly did, he could never quite conquer the stringent censorship of the time. But what does he know? Others see in it a demonic comedy, black and glittering with repressed avidity--like James Mason's eyes when they first fall upon Sue Lyon's Lolita--and driven by Peter Sellers' comic malevolence as Clare Quilty, Humbert's nemesis and thief of his love.

Quilty (Frank Langella) is not much of a presence in the new film, because he is not that much of one in Nabokov's novel. And it is, finally, Nabokov's narrative line that Lyne is honorably, faithfully following. As Lyne said last week, it cannot be tamed into a conventional three-act movie structure. And perhaps no film--even one that quotes great swatches of Nabokov--can ever be faithful to the shimmer and sheen of the novel's language, the diction of which so perfectly reflects the book's most entrancing perversity, the seduction of European innocence by shrewd American know-how.

Yes, it's the reversal of Henry James' great theme, and if there is a touch of greatness in Lyne's film, it lies in the way it forces that idea upon us--not through words, but in the playing of its principals. Long before the cops nab the fastidious Humbert, you begin to feel the moral scales shift, begin to think it is a punishment sufficient unto his sins that his dark passion should bring him to this: an odyssey through trailer-park America, with an emotionally messy teenager beside him, masticating a jawbreaker while the radio blares, "Bongo, bongo bongo, I don't want to leave the Congo." That surely is a releasable, even modestly admirable, achievement.