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THREE FOR THOUGHT WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT . . . FILM ADAPTATIONS

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At Oscar time, DAVID GILMOUR says, it's worth remembering those movies that improve upon the books that inspired them

DAVID GILMOUR

A generous percentage of this year's Best Film Oscar nominations owe their origins to books: Capote to the excellent biography of the same name by Gerald Clarke, Munich to Vengeance, by Canadian George Jonas, Brokeback Mountain to a short story by Annie Proulx. Like the debate about turning a play into a movie (too claustrophobic), the notion of transplanting popular literature onto celluloid appears to be an inexhaustible subject of chit-chat.

By necessity, there's an act of simplifying, of streamlining, that goes on when a book is made into a film. This can be to splendid effect, can make the narrative stronger, more focused, faster moving. A trimming down can also leave a viewer, especially if he has loved the book, feeling somewhat undernourished. But not always. Sometimes, the experience of the movie provides a more concentrated, more satisfying effect. Here are three films that this writer preferred to the novels upon which they were based, starting, hopefully, with the least debatable.

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And here's the part that probably won't win this reviewer any friends. Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (Putnam, 1955) is a great novel, not to mention an almost unthinkable idea -- an older man's fully sexualized love affair with a prepubescent girl -- for anyone to try to publish a book about back in the mid-1950s. It's a wonder Nabokov wasn't hanged for it. Stanley Kubrick made a not very good film of Lolita in 1962, with James Mason playing the lubricious Humbert Humbert.

But it was Adrian Lyne, the apparently shameless English director of Flashdance and Fatal Attraction, who made a film that is not necessarily better than the book but does, for this viewer, anyway, deliver a Lolita that is somehow more moving than the original masterpiece. It's a gorgeous-looking film (it cost $50-million), and features a young actor, 15-year-old Dominique Swain, who plays Lolita with such aplomb, such sex appeal, that she compromises the audience. Even though you know the whole business is terribly, terribly wrong (older man, 12-year-old girl), you still want it to happen, and you want to be there when it does. Maybe that's why director Lyne couldn't get a distributor. Everyone felt simply too guilty.

But the heart of the film, its genius if you'll forgive an overused word, is Jeremy Irons's performance. Such sadness, such desire, such -- and this is the important part -- tenderness. His performance takes you past judgment into understanding the way we understand Aschenbach's desire for the young boy in Death in Venice. Watch for a breathlessly romantic (not sexual) moment where the young Lolita, packed off for summer camp, realizes she's forgotten to say goodbye to Humbert. Dashing up the stairs like a child (which she is), she throws herself into his arms. The camera lingers on Iron's face. It is the expression of a man walking with almost religious ecstasy to his own execution.

David Gilmour's most recent novel, A Perfect Night to Go to China, won the Governor-General's Award for fiction.