Lolita (1997)

Lolita (1997)
Director: Adrian Lyne

This films greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. This movie plays Humberts obsession with Lolita seriously and sympathetically. You can’t help but feel bad for Humbert by the end of the movie as it is really Lolita who takes advantage of him and not the other way around. That is the film's strength but also the weakness; Lolita is 12 years old. That’s just creepy. This film tries to make you feel bad for a man who, for all intents and purposes, uses his charm and status as stepfather to sleep with his 12 year old daughter. I find it disturbing. Surely this was not Nabokov’s intention when he wrote the novel.

Jeremy Irons is very good at the role he plays, but he isn’t the character the books gives us. The character in the book was not a nice man. He drugged his wife, he planned to drug Lolita to take advantage of her while she slept, he lied and manipulated, he planned in his mind to kill his wife and probably would have had she not been killed before he could get to it. But Jeremy Irons is not like that at all. His character is just a lonely man in the wrong place at the wrong time; he is haunted and almost, it seems, justified in his love(?) for Lolita by the sad events of his childhood.

Melanie Griffith is not a good Charlotte at all. She is not nagging enough, she is far too good looking, and until she give Humbert her love letter there is no indication that she is in love with him. There definitely needed to be more time spent developing her character.

Doninque Swain seemed far too aware of what she was doing at times, and far too childish at other times. The film made her look like the bad guy for seducing Humbert and using his obsession with her as a weapon against him. This isn't how the book intended her to be.

Clare Quilty is all but absent in this film. He has a very short appearance at the hotel, and then we don’t see him again until the end of the film. The book gives him a lot of charisma that was completely absent; in this film he is just a dirty old man. Look to Sellers performance in the 1962 version for a much more rounded and exact portrayal of Quilty.

Overall, this was not a bad film if it stood on its own. The camera work is very good in expressing the emotions of the film and Jeremy Irons is excellent is his portrayal of a Humbert (albeit a different one that was presented to us in the book) but this film misses the message of the book even if it is a more literal cinematic translation of the book.

My rating: 4 of out 5