Lolita seduces

Nabokov's masterpiece crosses the line

by Peter Keough

LOLITA. Directed by Adrian Lyne. Written by Stephen Schiff adapted from the novel by Vladimir Nabokov. With Jeremy Irons, Dominique Swain, Melanie Griffith, and Frank Langella. A Samuel Goldwyn Film release. At the ane Pickens.

The new adaptation of Lolita has struggled against so many obstacles before it reached the screen that whether it is any good seems almost irrelevant. Pedophilia was just the beginning of its problems -- what about Adrian Lyne? Was the director who blew Glenn Close away in a bathtub in Fatal Attraction the best person to deal with a subjective narrative that's immersed in the most sublime English prose of this half-century and told from an utterly unreliable narrative point of view? Was the guy who sent Kim Basinger crawling after greenbacks up to translating onto film this masterpiece of sexual obsession?

Some misgivings are eased in the first few minutes. Humbert Humbert (Jeremy Irons), rueful, resigned, and magnificently ruined, drives his 1948 Plymouth "woody" down a rolling highway past shimmering landscapes, his hands bloodstained and clutching a bobby pin, swerving from side to side on the road with deliberate indifference. "Lolita," he says in voiceover, "Light of my life, fire of my loins. My soul, my sin."

It's the first of the film's generous quotations from the novel, and from that moment on it will be impossible to hear Nabokov's prose in any other voice than Irons's. This capturing of the voice of the novel goes a long way to making its despicable events not only comprehensible but tragically moving -- as well as defusing the film's lapses in taste. Throw in Lyne's (for the most part) uncharacteristic visual restraint and inspiration, Stephen Schiff's shrewd screenplay, and solid performances headed by Irons's best since Dead Ringers and Lolita the movie comes close to transforming the sordid case history of a fortysomething European pedant obsessed with a precocious but otherwise ordinary 12-year-old girl into a universal ode to loss and desire.

For Humbert is not so much a pervert as a romantic. In one of his best sequences, Lyne relates the explanation of Humbert's tendencies -- an adolescent love that ended with his beloved Annabel's sudden death from typhoid -- with a gold-tinged, fade-to-black series of flashback episodes that give credence to what could have come across as pat rationalization. Years later, adrift in small-town American academe, Humbert, already an acknowledged fancier of "nymphets" (sexually awakened girls of the same age as the late Annabel), meets his match in Dolores Haze (newcomer Dominique Swain, a bit horsy but deftly balancing guile and ingenuousness). In one of Lyne's too frequent kitschy groaners, Lolita, as the ready linguist Humbert will dub her, is spotted lolling under a lawn sprinkler, more a candidate for a wet-T-shirt contest than a Dantesque vision.

But then, the point of the book and movie might be that both are one and the same. Lolita is the daughter of Charlotte (Melanie Griffith, making blowziness a virtue), Humbert's widowed landlady, a vulgarian jealous of her daughter and hot for Humbert. He exploits Charlotte to gain access to Lolita, and the awkward dance between avuncularism and eroticism between him and the teasing Lolita aches with possibility and frustration. A catastrophe intercedes (Lyne's handling of this accident, as with a later scene of violence, is subtle, shocking, and surreal), Humbert's dream comes true, and he flees across America with his illicit beloved, pursued, it turns out, by more than his guilty conscience.

This odyssey is long and troubled not just for the runaway couple. Nabokov set his story in a late-'40s America that was as alien, appalling, and as attractive to him as, well, a 12-year-old American girl is to his hero, and he reproduces the milieu with hallucinatory accuracy. The filmmakers are less rigorous. Anachronisms coupled with Lyne's predilection for the garishly trite (a scene with a bug zapper is especially egregious, and Lolita's food fetishism à la 91/2 weeks is laughable) come close to smashing the artifice to pieces. On the other hand, Schiff creditably fills the gaps left by the text in the details of the pair's lives on the road together -- the bizarre but eerily familiar mix of parent/lover, idol/annoyance that is their relationship.

As for the sin of pedophilia, it goes neither unpunished nor uncomprehended. As Lyne suggests, the distance between Humbert's point of view and reality grows the farther he and Lolita flee, and so does his awareness of his culpability and doom. In the inexorably wrenching ending, a return to the opening images that fulfills the promise of their poetry, Humbert realizes that his love for children is compensation for the loss of childhood itself, the innocence before words and images got in the way. For most of us, there is the consolation of art -- which Lolita, both Lyne's and Nabokov's, fulfills.

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Moral Schiff

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