Girl Trouble

It's Showtime for Adrian Lyne's pricey new version of Lolita.

by Sam Adams

Directed by Adrian Lyne

Premiering on Showtime, Sun., August 2.

Watching The Watcher: Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain at the movies in Lolita

It was she who seduced me." Those words, spoken by Humbert Humbert, the nymphet-obsessed narrator of Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel Lolita, are at the heart of the dazzling complexity of Nabokov's work, and illustrate as well as any others why the novel has remained perennially controversial, and why Adrian Lyne's $60 million screen adaptation has, after a two-year struggle, found no more lucrative home for itself than the Showtime cable network.

Apart from its subject matter—and Lolita is a novel "about" pedophilia only in the sense that Moby-Dick is a novel about whaling—the most striking aspect of Nabokov's novel is its densely layered, devastatingly clever prose; Nabokov once said that the book was the story of his own love affair with the English language, as much as the story of Humbert's love affair with the 12-year-old light of his life. Told entirely in first-person narration, the novel forces the reader into Humbert's head.

Humbert's every utterance is couched in irony or romance. He seems incapable of processing emotion without transforming it into a literary event. His passion for little girls is explained through his theory of the "nymphet," something like a woman in the body of a teenager, a preternaturally sexual creature against whom those who perceive her charms are helpless. Lolita is, of course, such a creature.

Jeremy Irons' Humbert seems more innocent than Lolita; hes's about as sexed up as a toasted crumpet. He's too inward an actor to give the feeling of someone who might explode.

"It was she who seduced me." Couched in Humbert's voice, the statement is immediately dubious, but the question of its veracity remains provocatively unresolved. Although being trapped inside Humbert's mind prevents any semblance of objectivity, so does it prevent our definitively disproving anything he says. Can a 12-year-old really seduce a middle-aged man? There's a space between what seems impossible and what might be probable, and the whole of Lolita exists in that space. What makes the novel powerful is that Humbert might be telling the truth; what makes it bearable is that he might not.

On screen, such ambiguity is all but impossible to pull off. It takes a devilishly complicated mix of overt and subtle stylization, one that a director of such limited skill as Adrian Lyne—who with such greasy, pandering films as Indecent Proposal and Fatal Attraction has not exactly proven himself a master of subtlety—can't possibly muster. In Lyne's Lolita, the question of who seduced whom is answered in no uncertain terms.

Still, it's to Lyne's credit that his answer is the more interesting and potentially dangerous choice. In Dominique Swain, who was 14 when Lolita was filmed (and who has since been seen as a more mature teen in Face/Off), Lyne gives us a nymphet who is every bit the predatory woman-child Humbert describes. When first we see Lolita, she is supine on the grass under a sprinkler, near-transparent dress clinging to her body, and the image is so pat and slick as to suggest self-parody, but masterfully, Lyne undercuts his own commercial tendencies; from the grin of sexual delirium spreading across Humbert's face, we cut back to Lolita, who returns the smile, the thin metal band of her retainer glinting dully between her lips.

Although the movie is, not surprisingly, less graphic than the novel, it doesn't shy away from depicting Lolita at her most sexually forthright and her most childish, or most memorably, both at once; in one scene, she negotiates a raise in her allowance by running her hand further and further up Humbert's leg. Lolita is shown at her most desperate, too, and confused, while Humbert appears more and more tyrannical as Lolita begins to mature, passing from nymphetude into young womanhood. As incarnated by a somewhat deadfaced Jeremy Irons, Humbert seems most irredeemable at those moments when he most clearly resists Lolita's attempts to exert control over her own situation—whether it be to choose her lovers or where she leaves her gum.

It's Swain's mercurial caginess that most distinguishes this version from Stanley Kubrick's 1962 attempt. Although the earlier version, with its Nabokov-penned screenplay, better captured Humbert's bristling intellect and the novel's playful tone (Lyne isn't much on word games), it completely denatured the title character. (Perhaps more of the book's head was in the earlier version, but not much of its heart.) Sue Lyon played Lolita as a miniature woman, all poise and confidence; Swain's Lolita is a far more disturbing and complex creation. She's allowed, of course, to be more sexual on screen than Lyon was—she runs her tongue over Irons' lips in a way adult women couldn't get away with onscreen in 1962—but more importantly, her performance reminds us that, for all her brazenness and experience, Lolita is still a child. Merely for containing such a performance, this new film Lolita is, whatever its faults, far superior to the 1962 version, which like most of Kubrick's films contains not a shred of recognizable human emotion.

Still, despite Swain's stunning mixture of sexual brazenness and impetuous hysteria, Lyne's film remains largely unmoving. You'd think the fleshly reality of the contact between Irons and Swain would make a viewer uncomfortable; after all, it's one thing to read about a middle-aged man having sex with a 12-year-old and quite another to see it onscreen (although steps were taken to protect Swain from any untoward physicality: towels were placed between her and Irons before she sat on his lap, and that's a 19-year-old body double running her hand up Iron's leg, as well as in the film's one brief nude scene.) But in the era when we've gone from sexualizing adult women who look like teenagers to sexualizing actual teenagers (e.g. Dawson's Creek, or Martina Hingis' GQ cover), Lyne's toned-down but still commercial style is too much like what we've already seen. As Nabokov did, Lyne succeeds in making us feel the erotic tension between Humbert and Lolita, which is essential if the audience is to be pulled in at all, but Lyne simply hasn't the intelligence or the skill to add another layer to the story, to engage the audience and make them question their engagement.

Where Lolita ultimately falters is in Irons' portrayal of Humbert. Oddly, it's he who seems too innocent and not Lolita. Whatever his hesitations about fulfilling his predilection for little girls, Humbert's lusts should never be in doubt; this is, after all, a man who has invented a theory to justify his perverse desires. But Jeremy Irons simply seems incapable of playing lusts; he's about as sexed up as a toasted crumpet. Only if we feel Humbert's out-of-control urges can we gain a sense of how dangerous he is, but Irons is too inward-looking an actor to give the feeling of someone who might explode. When the script calls for him to slap Lolita, there's no connection to the rest of his character; it's as if Humbert were being played by a body double as well. Melanie Griffith is also hideously miscast as Lolita's mother (who, unlike Griffith, is supposed to be vaguely intelligent), and Frank Langella is too trapped by Dutch angles and high-key lighting to do much with the role of Quilty.

Interestingly, James Mason's 1962 Humbert suffered from a similar passionlessness. It's as if, on some level, the filmmakers were trying to protect us from seeing the full story, as if a full-grown man's explicit lust for a teenager were, finally, too much to bear. Ralph Fiennes might have made an excellent Humbert; unlike Irons, he suggests someone who might go mad with passion, and not just a little dotty. He suggests, too, the sexual vigor of a man who, we're told, puts it to his young charge a half-dozen times in the same night. Irons, with his tubercular complexion, suggests a man who might get halfway through the first time before rolling over and letting David Frost lull him to sleep.

The controversy surrounding Lolita's release or lack thereof unavoidably does the film a disservice, since it's hardly the untouchable piece of filth the distributors' collective duck-and-cover act would suggest. Former sleazemeister Lyne approaches tasteful filmmaking with the zeal of the newly converted. In fact, the film is scheduled for a limited theatrical release later in the fall, although it will have nothing like the nationwide distribution it would need to earn back its budget. (It will also air on the Sundance Channel in 1999.) Lyne and screenwriter Steven Schiff have publicly blamed the nation's currently nervous stance toward anything that might be construed as child pornography for the distributors' reluctance to pick up the film. But since public outcry against it has been practically nil, it's not hard to imagine that Lolita's long tenure on the shelf may have as much to do with that fact that Lyne has basically made the most expensive art house movie in history, and expectations of a wider release or greater acquisition fee were simply unrealistic. As it is, the French company Chargeurs, the major investor, stands to lose as much as $40 million. There's no doubt that Lolita's subject matter quashed a lot of distributor interest, but if the film had been made (as it should have been) for one-third, or one-tenth its budget, it would have been playing on American screens a long time ago. Granted, a money-hungry investor isn't as sexy an explanation for Lolita's late release as the iron fist of Puritan repression, but sometimes causes aren't quite as célèbres as they seem.