Subject
Lyne/Schiff LO: The TIMES Review (fwd)
Date
Body
THE ARTS/CINEMA MARCH 23, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 11
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Taking a Peek at Lolita
And it's a shame you can't see more than that
By RICHARD SCHICKEL
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ere'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.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
Taking a Peek at Lolita
And it's a shame you can't see more than that
By RICHARD SCHICKEL
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
ere'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.
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