Taking a Peek at Lolita

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

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).

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.