Subject
NYTimes on Lyne/Schiff LOLITA
Date
Body
March 15, 1998
A Movie America Can't See
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By CARYN JAMES
`Jeremy Irons has a look of anguished despair on his face, which is
splattered with droplets of blood. He slumps against the window as he drives
an old wooden-sided station wagon, swerving on and off a country road. In
one bloodied hand he holds a bobby pin as if it were the greatest treasure
on earth; on the seat beside him is a gun. Then Humbert Humbert, the man who
has loved a 12-year-old girl, begins his long confession. In voice-over, Mr.
Irons offers the most famous lines from one of the most poetic, romantic
novels ever written: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my
soul, Lo-lee-ta."
This opening scene of unexpected power sets the tone for Adrian Lyne's film
"Lolita." Like Vladimir Nabokov's novel, it is an eloquent tragedy laced
with wit and a serious, disturbing work of art.
The latest "Lolita" was rumored to be something different: an overpriced
movie about a forbidden subject, and not a very good movie at that. No
longer new, the film has yet to be shown to American audiences, though it
was finished a year ago. When I saw it last month at a theater in Paris,
there was a disproportionate number of American tourists in the audience,
surely aware that the film had been rejected by every major distributor in
the United States and might never appear here at all.
Now that the film has opened in several European cities, to mixed reviews
and middling box-office returns, its American fate seems more dismal than
ever. In recent weeks, Pathé, the French production company that owns the
film, has come close to selling it to Showtime, which would make "Lolita"
the most expensive, highest-profile film ever to be dumped directly to cable
television. There have been last-ditch efforts by Mr. Lyne and his agent,
Jeff Berg of I.C.M., to persuade Pathé to sell "Lolita" to a small American
distributor; that would bring the film to theaters in a handful of cities,
saving face for the director. Either possibility may still come through. But
if "Lolita" is not quite dead, it is, like Humbert in the opening scene,
bloodied, beaten down and reaching the end of the road. Unlike Humbert, it
doesn't deserve this fate.
Mr. Lyne blames Hollywood's moral cowardice for the rejection of "Lolita,"
pointing out, "The community is not renowned for making courageous
decisions." Hollywood distributors blame the quality of the film. "No one
liked it enough" is the remarkably consistent, though anonymous, chant from
many who turned it down. There is something to both arguments, and no single
reason for the rejection of "Lolita." And while there is no other case quite
like it, the movie's tortured life reveals much about the social climate of
the country, about Hollywood and money, and about the dwindling audience for
serious art films.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
Nabokov's 'Lolita' was misunderstood, and so is Adrian Lyne's.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
"In Hollywood, if there's a good movie, no matter what's going on
in it, somebody's going to buy it," said one of the distributors who
disliked the film, arguing that the subject "seemed too real" and
wondering, "Who are you going to like in the movie?" Those objections
perfectly represent Hollywood's problems with the film. It's true that
the story of Humbert Humbert is not a crowd pleaser. Following the novel
faithfully, the film lets Humbert tell of arriving in the New England town
of Ramsdale in 1947 and marrying the horrifyingly bourgeois Charlotte Haze
(played by Melanie Griffith) to be near her enticing daughter, Lolita
(Dominique Swain). When Charlotte dies, Humbert embarks on a sexual
relationship and an extended road trip with Lolita. More important, the
film is faithful to Humbert's description of himself as "an artist and a
madman," who eventually realizes he has been reprehensible in his
treatment of Lolita. But the subtlety and ambiguity of the character
demand a sophistication not usually found in movie marketing campaigns. In
Hollywood, "Lolita" was often reduced to nothing more than a movie about
sex with a minor. Many distributors noted that the JonBenet Ramsey murder
and the child murders by a pedophile in Belgium, cases that hit the
headlines when "Lolita" was being shopped around, made the film even
trickier to market, presenting the specter of conservative opposition to
it. One person whose company passed said of Lolita's character, "In this
climate of greater sensitivity, people reacted to her not as a nymphet but
as a child." This is a common response, but a peculiar one. Ms. Swain
looks like an adolescent, not a little girl. And if anything, it should be
easier today to see Lolita as a nymphet rather than a child. Sexually
precocious teen-agers are more common in the 90's than they were in 1962,
when Stanley Kubrick's "Lolita" appeared. (In that weirdly distorted film,
James Mason's Humbert comes across as a dirty old man, leering at Sue Lyon
as Lolita.) But the sex-with-a-child theme clearly scared distributors
away. These are not yahoos talking, but business people who had no reason
to take a risk on what they saw as a failed movie. "If you're going to
offend the parents of America," one of them wryly put it, "you might as
well do it with a film you love." "Lolita" is certainly not flawless. It
is dully repetitious in the last 40 minutes as Humbert and Lolita travel
the country and he becomes increasingly suspicious that they are being
trailed (nothing a deft 15-minute cut in the 2-hour-17-minute film
couldn't fix). That weakness is minor when weighed against so many
stunning and emotionally gripping qualities. The most dazzling is Mr.
Irons's performance, among his absolute best. One of Nabokov's brilliant
choices was to cast the novel as Humbert's memoir, to have him look back
with wistfulness, enduring love and horror at his affair with Lolita, and
to redeem himself through the beauty of his language. "Oh, my Lolita, I
have only words to play with!" he says. Language is essential to
"Lolita," and Mr. Irons captures Humbert's voice perfectly. In the Random
House audio book, he reads the novel (11 1/2 hours long) with a
sensitivity to the language that conveys all of Nabokov's humor, passion
and lyricism. (The audio book is one of the movie's great side benefits.)
But the film avoids the trap of making "Lolita" too literary on screen.
Mr. Irons's narration flows gracefully in and out of the film, enough to
capture Nabokov's poetry but not so much that viewers feel the movie is
being explained. His face registers Humbert's conflicting emotions, often
of lust and sorrow at the same time. His performance alone would make
"Lolita" worthwhile; around him, the movie is filled with visual texture
and drama. When Hollywood decided this film was not good enough, that
meant it was not good in a predictable, mainstream way. The audience for
"Lolita" is most likely an art-house audience, and that came as a shock.
After all, Mr. Lyne's track record for commercial hits includes
"Flashdance" "Fatal Attraction" and "Indecent Proposal." With "Lolita,"
the director's reputation may have boomeranged against him. Nobody
expected Mr. Fatal Attraction to turn out an art film; maybe that's why
the budget was allowed to mushroom (to more than $50 million), as
production took place all over the United States. With it sweeping vistas,
its re-creations of tacky tourist motels ("Eat and Sleep in a Teepee"
reads one sign), its beautifully photographed small towns, "Lolita" looks
extravagant on screen. But extravagance is the last thing an art film can
afford -- especially one that cannot be sold on its sex appeal. Sex is not
explicitly depicted in the film, which was not necessarily the original
idea. "I sat with a lawyer for six weeks in 1996 in a cutting room," said
Mr. Lyne, in a conversation about "Lolita" in New York two weeks ago. The
1996 Child Pornography Prevention Act meant that he had to cut scenes that
suggested Ms. Swain (then 15 years old) was having sex, even though those
scenes were filmed with a body double. After that, the film was submitted
to the Motion Picture Association of America and got an R rating.
nd
"Lolita" did not come with the artistic cachet that leads to Academy Award
nominations either. It is not a sweeping romance like "The English
Patient." Though Mr. Irons's performance is at least as good as any
nominated this year, what are the odds that he would be nominated for
playing Humbert Humbert? As Mr. Lyne says of Humbert: "It's hideous what
he does, and at the end of the novel it breaks your heart. People don't
want to sympathize with a pedophile." It is hard to imagine the Oscar
campaign. Of course Humbert is disturbing; "Lolita" in all its
incarnations is meant to be seductively disturbing. And some of the
problems in finding a distributor for the Lyne film speak directly to the
different impact of novels and movies. It is one thing to read Humbert's
memoir and hear him describe Lolita as a coquette, and to write of their
first sexual encounter, "I am going to tell you something very strange; it
was she who seduced me." How much is he embellishing in his imaginative
tale? It is quite different to see Ms. Swain roll over in bed and kiss Mr.
Irons passionately, to whisper in his ear, to act seductive. Putting the
action in front of a viewer makes it real, even though we are still
confined to Humbert's skewed perspective. Yet if the relationship
acquires physical life on screen, that is also what makes the film
powerfully upsetting. In its most distressing scene, Lolita sits on
Humbert's lap reading the comics; the camera moves in on her face, which
gradually registers an unmistakable orgasmic expression. It is a
stomach-churning moment because she has so clearly, as Humbert later
realizes, had her innocence stolen from her. "Lolita" asks its audience
to confront and share the darkest emotions. But with its uncompromising
vision and its big budget, the film priced itself out of its market from
the start. Pathé's initial asking price for the film's American
distribution was around $25 million -- necessary considering what the film
had cost, yet insane considering its limited art-house audience. The
price fell fast, but probably not far enough fast enough, and the film
quickly came to seem like damaged goods. "They set their sights too high
financially at first," Mr. Lyne said. People on both sides agree that in
the later stages money was not the issue. But by then, even distributors
who could have picked up the film for Hollywood pocket change (maybe as
little as a million dollars) ran away from it. "No one thought it would
generate income," as one distributor put it, or at least not enough to
make it worth the battle. Even Mr. Lyne now acknowledges the film's
limited audience. "It's not necessarily a movie that should be in 2,000
theaters, or even 1,000," he said. But he would like it to be seen on a
screen. About the possibility that it may go directly to Showtime, he
said: "It would be a bitter pill if it went straight to television. I've
got nothing against Showtime, but I didn't make it for television. If it
were for television, I would have made it in 30 days." But he also says
he's getting philosophical. "Maybe this is a movie people will come around
to," he said. In fact, I saw "Lolita" a second time more recently, at a
screening arranged in New York for this article. And it works even better
when you're able to sink into its time and place and character, after the
rumors that swirl around it during the first viewing (Why can't it be
shown here? Is it as bad as they say?) have been cleared away. Of course,
taking the long view doesn't help the aging "Lolita" now.
A Movie America Can't See
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
By CARYN JAMES
`Jeremy Irons has a look of anguished despair on his face, which is
splattered with droplets of blood. He slumps against the window as he drives
an old wooden-sided station wagon, swerving on and off a country road. In
one bloodied hand he holds a bobby pin as if it were the greatest treasure
on earth; on the seat beside him is a gun. Then Humbert Humbert, the man who
has loved a 12-year-old girl, begins his long confession. In voice-over, Mr.
Irons offers the most famous lines from one of the most poetic, romantic
novels ever written: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my
soul, Lo-lee-ta."
This opening scene of unexpected power sets the tone for Adrian Lyne's film
"Lolita." Like Vladimir Nabokov's novel, it is an eloquent tragedy laced
with wit and a serious, disturbing work of art.
The latest "Lolita" was rumored to be something different: an overpriced
movie about a forbidden subject, and not a very good movie at that. No
longer new, the film has yet to be shown to American audiences, though it
was finished a year ago. When I saw it last month at a theater in Paris,
there was a disproportionate number of American tourists in the audience,
surely aware that the film had been rejected by every major distributor in
the United States and might never appear here at all.
Now that the film has opened in several European cities, to mixed reviews
and middling box-office returns, its American fate seems more dismal than
ever. In recent weeks, Pathé, the French production company that owns the
film, has come close to selling it to Showtime, which would make "Lolita"
the most expensive, highest-profile film ever to be dumped directly to cable
television. There have been last-ditch efforts by Mr. Lyne and his agent,
Jeff Berg of I.C.M., to persuade Pathé to sell "Lolita" to a small American
distributor; that would bring the film to theaters in a handful of cities,
saving face for the director. Either possibility may still come through. But
if "Lolita" is not quite dead, it is, like Humbert in the opening scene,
bloodied, beaten down and reaching the end of the road. Unlike Humbert, it
doesn't deserve this fate.
Mr. Lyne blames Hollywood's moral cowardice for the rejection of "Lolita,"
pointing out, "The community is not renowned for making courageous
decisions." Hollywood distributors blame the quality of the film. "No one
liked it enough" is the remarkably consistent, though anonymous, chant from
many who turned it down. There is something to both arguments, and no single
reason for the rejection of "Lolita." And while there is no other case quite
like it, the movie's tortured life reveals much about the social climate of
the country, about Hollywood and money, and about the dwindling audience for
serious art films.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
Nabokov's 'Lolita' was misunderstood, and so is Adrian Lyne's.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
"In Hollywood, if there's a good movie, no matter what's going on
in it, somebody's going to buy it," said one of the distributors who
disliked the film, arguing that the subject "seemed too real" and
wondering, "Who are you going to like in the movie?" Those objections
perfectly represent Hollywood's problems with the film. It's true that
the story of Humbert Humbert is not a crowd pleaser. Following the novel
faithfully, the film lets Humbert tell of arriving in the New England town
of Ramsdale in 1947 and marrying the horrifyingly bourgeois Charlotte Haze
(played by Melanie Griffith) to be near her enticing daughter, Lolita
(Dominique Swain). When Charlotte dies, Humbert embarks on a sexual
relationship and an extended road trip with Lolita. More important, the
film is faithful to Humbert's description of himself as "an artist and a
madman," who eventually realizes he has been reprehensible in his
treatment of Lolita. But the subtlety and ambiguity of the character
demand a sophistication not usually found in movie marketing campaigns. In
Hollywood, "Lolita" was often reduced to nothing more than a movie about
sex with a minor. Many distributors noted that the JonBenet Ramsey murder
and the child murders by a pedophile in Belgium, cases that hit the
headlines when "Lolita" was being shopped around, made the film even
trickier to market, presenting the specter of conservative opposition to
it. One person whose company passed said of Lolita's character, "In this
climate of greater sensitivity, people reacted to her not as a nymphet but
as a child." This is a common response, but a peculiar one. Ms. Swain
looks like an adolescent, not a little girl. And if anything, it should be
easier today to see Lolita as a nymphet rather than a child. Sexually
precocious teen-agers are more common in the 90's than they were in 1962,
when Stanley Kubrick's "Lolita" appeared. (In that weirdly distorted film,
James Mason's Humbert comes across as a dirty old man, leering at Sue Lyon
as Lolita.) But the sex-with-a-child theme clearly scared distributors
away. These are not yahoos talking, but business people who had no reason
to take a risk on what they saw as a failed movie. "If you're going to
offend the parents of America," one of them wryly put it, "you might as
well do it with a film you love." "Lolita" is certainly not flawless. It
is dully repetitious in the last 40 minutes as Humbert and Lolita travel
the country and he becomes increasingly suspicious that they are being
trailed (nothing a deft 15-minute cut in the 2-hour-17-minute film
couldn't fix). That weakness is minor when weighed against so many
stunning and emotionally gripping qualities. The most dazzling is Mr.
Irons's performance, among his absolute best. One of Nabokov's brilliant
choices was to cast the novel as Humbert's memoir, to have him look back
with wistfulness, enduring love and horror at his affair with Lolita, and
to redeem himself through the beauty of his language. "Oh, my Lolita, I
have only words to play with!" he says. Language is essential to
"Lolita," and Mr. Irons captures Humbert's voice perfectly. In the Random
House audio book, he reads the novel (11 1/2 hours long) with a
sensitivity to the language that conveys all of Nabokov's humor, passion
and lyricism. (The audio book is one of the movie's great side benefits.)
But the film avoids the trap of making "Lolita" too literary on screen.
Mr. Irons's narration flows gracefully in and out of the film, enough to
capture Nabokov's poetry but not so much that viewers feel the movie is
being explained. His face registers Humbert's conflicting emotions, often
of lust and sorrow at the same time. His performance alone would make
"Lolita" worthwhile; around him, the movie is filled with visual texture
and drama. When Hollywood decided this film was not good enough, that
meant it was not good in a predictable, mainstream way. The audience for
"Lolita" is most likely an art-house audience, and that came as a shock.
After all, Mr. Lyne's track record for commercial hits includes
"Flashdance" "Fatal Attraction" and "Indecent Proposal." With "Lolita,"
the director's reputation may have boomeranged against him. Nobody
expected Mr. Fatal Attraction to turn out an art film; maybe that's why
the budget was allowed to mushroom (to more than $50 million), as
production took place all over the United States. With it sweeping vistas,
its re-creations of tacky tourist motels ("Eat and Sleep in a Teepee"
reads one sign), its beautifully photographed small towns, "Lolita" looks
extravagant on screen. But extravagance is the last thing an art film can
afford -- especially one that cannot be sold on its sex appeal. Sex is not
explicitly depicted in the film, which was not necessarily the original
idea. "I sat with a lawyer for six weeks in 1996 in a cutting room," said
Mr. Lyne, in a conversation about "Lolita" in New York two weeks ago. The
1996 Child Pornography Prevention Act meant that he had to cut scenes that
suggested Ms. Swain (then 15 years old) was having sex, even though those
scenes were filmed with a body double. After that, the film was submitted
to the Motion Picture Association of America and got an R rating.
nd
"Lolita" did not come with the artistic cachet that leads to Academy Award
nominations either. It is not a sweeping romance like "The English
Patient." Though Mr. Irons's performance is at least as good as any
nominated this year, what are the odds that he would be nominated for
playing Humbert Humbert? As Mr. Lyne says of Humbert: "It's hideous what
he does, and at the end of the novel it breaks your heart. People don't
want to sympathize with a pedophile." It is hard to imagine the Oscar
campaign. Of course Humbert is disturbing; "Lolita" in all its
incarnations is meant to be seductively disturbing. And some of the
problems in finding a distributor for the Lyne film speak directly to the
different impact of novels and movies. It is one thing to read Humbert's
memoir and hear him describe Lolita as a coquette, and to write of their
first sexual encounter, "I am going to tell you something very strange; it
was she who seduced me." How much is he embellishing in his imaginative
tale? It is quite different to see Ms. Swain roll over in bed and kiss Mr.
Irons passionately, to whisper in his ear, to act seductive. Putting the
action in front of a viewer makes it real, even though we are still
confined to Humbert's skewed perspective. Yet if the relationship
acquires physical life on screen, that is also what makes the film
powerfully upsetting. In its most distressing scene, Lolita sits on
Humbert's lap reading the comics; the camera moves in on her face, which
gradually registers an unmistakable orgasmic expression. It is a
stomach-churning moment because she has so clearly, as Humbert later
realizes, had her innocence stolen from her. "Lolita" asks its audience
to confront and share the darkest emotions. But with its uncompromising
vision and its big budget, the film priced itself out of its market from
the start. Pathé's initial asking price for the film's American
distribution was around $25 million -- necessary considering what the film
had cost, yet insane considering its limited art-house audience. The
price fell fast, but probably not far enough fast enough, and the film
quickly came to seem like damaged goods. "They set their sights too high
financially at first," Mr. Lyne said. People on both sides agree that in
the later stages money was not the issue. But by then, even distributors
who could have picked up the film for Hollywood pocket change (maybe as
little as a million dollars) ran away from it. "No one thought it would
generate income," as one distributor put it, or at least not enough to
make it worth the battle. Even Mr. Lyne now acknowledges the film's
limited audience. "It's not necessarily a movie that should be in 2,000
theaters, or even 1,000," he said. But he would like it to be seen on a
screen. About the possibility that it may go directly to Showtime, he
said: "It would be a bitter pill if it went straight to television. I've
got nothing against Showtime, but I didn't make it for television. If it
were for television, I would have made it in 30 days." But he also says
he's getting philosophical. "Maybe this is a movie people will come around
to," he said. In fact, I saw "Lolita" a second time more recently, at a
screening arranged in New York for this article. And it works even better
when you're able to sink into its time and place and character, after the
rumors that swirl around it during the first viewing (Why can't it be
shown here? Is it as bad as they say?) have been cleared away. Of course,
taking the long view doesn't help the aging "Lolita" now.