Lolita
Stanley Kubrick (1962)
Sue Lyon’s appearance is a problem and there’s a loss of rhythm in the last half hour but Stanley Kubrick’s dramatisation of the mind of Humbert Humbert makes this adaptation of the Nabokov novel highly exciting and excitingly enjoyable. (Nabokov wrote the screenplay – although it then got changed extensively.) Kubrick shows how Humbert’s possessiveness of the ‘nymphet’ Dolores ‘Lolita’ Haze and his conflicted feelings about his life with her work up into a madly inseparable pas de deux. You get a compelling sense of the way that an obsession reshapes the world of the person obsessed, both reducing and intensifying that world. There’s a sequence in which Lolita storms out on Humbert and, as she disappears, he finds himself detained on the doorstep of their house in a fatuously civil conversation with a neighbour. He eventually escapes to look for Lolita and finds her in a phone box, in a deserted part of town. There’s a light in the phone box and darkness all around it – a perfect image of the bleakness and power of Humbert’s monomania. In another fine sequence, we see the couple at home with Humbert painting Lolita’s toenails. He’s edgy about the boyfriends she’s making at school; she’s exasperated by his suffocating jealousy. It’s a vivid illustration of how the abnormal can become not just normal but stultifyingly routine.
As the picture enters its closing stages, the editing between scenes is increasingly sluggish and, although it has some fine passages (especially James Mason’s breakdown), the sequence in which Humbert finds Lolita again, married and with a baby, goes on too long. But, given what Kubrick achieves in Lolita, these are relatively minor faults. He demonstrates what seems, in retrospect, a surprising talent for comedy. There’s social comedy in the uneasy courtship of Humbert and Lolita’s mother, Charlotte, and, when Charlotte has been knocked down and killed by a speeding car, in the procession of mourners who visit Humbert as he’s taking a bath. There’s physical comedy, as Humbert and a hotel employee struggle to set up a folding bed at the foot of the double bed in which Lolita is sleeping. The story, after a prologue which also forms part of the climax to the film, starts off in New Hampshire, where Humbert rents a room from Charlotte for the summer before taking up an academic post in Ohio. Once the relationship between Humbert and Lolita takes off, and invites suspicion, they move from state to state and from hotel to motel. The shifting geography and the persistent anonymity of their accommodation combine to underline both the precariousness and the immutability of Humbert’s situation – and to express what’s going on inside his head as well as in the world outside.
The received wisdom that Sue Lyon is much too old to play Lolita is, to a large extent, unjust. Lyon is skilful – for example, when Lolita is annoyed or nagging she picks up her mother’s tone and voice pattern. She’s very good at doing knowing insouciance – not just in the moments when Lolita is obviously flirting with Humbert but in, say, the way she sits beside him in the car eating a packet of crisps. But the fact that Lyon, who was fifteen at the time, looks to be only just a minor mutes the shocking originality of the love story in the novel, where Lolita, when Humbert starts a sexual relationship with her, is only twelve. Because Sue Lyon was precociously well developed, she has a sexuality that makes the story relatively innocuous – though it’s still a fine study of a middle-aged man’s desire for a woman several decades younger. (The smooth romantic familiarity of the ‘Lolita theme’ music by Bob Harris is very effective in suggesting and subverting countless screen romances of a more conventional kind.) The script is confused about what age Lolita is supposed to be: whereas scenes like the high school dance have presumably been rewritten (I did read the book thirty years or so ago but don’t remember it in any detail) to make her late-adolescent, a hotel booking clerk doesn’t bat an eyelid about Humbert and ‘the child’ sharing a room. Also, Lyon doesn’t seem to have aged sufficiently for the scene in which Humbert visits her as a wife and mother.
The performances of James Mason, Shelley Winters and Peter Sellers are all, in their different ways, marvellous. In some of the early scenes, Mason as Humbert seems to be feeling his way but once he gets his bearings he’s terrific: his delivery of punchlines – particularly the way he abbreviates an already short sentence or monosyllable – is masterly. His smiling pretence, when Humbert is suffering agonies of distaste or impatience (talking affably but desperate to get away from his interlocutor), is exquisite. Mason’s sneering tone is just right for conveying Humbert’s academic pedantry; it also invests him with a smallness that gives a surprising and distinctive aspect to the eventual pathos of the character. Shelley Winters’s naturalistic acting skills are so perfectly secure that she’s able to go over the top in her playing of the avidly ingratiating, grotesque but sexy Charlotte and still seem true. As Clare Quilty, Peter Sellers gives his finest screen performance – greater, I think, than in Dr Strangelove because the multiple guises in which Quilty appears work so powerfully on Humbert’s nerves and become the essence of the film. Sellers’s inhuman artificiality makes him chimerical, the projection of a paranoid brain; yet his amorphous bulkiness gives him a physical insistence. The difficulty of getting a purchase on Quilty’s (ir)reality is intriguing. Sellers, extraordinarily vocally inventive (and very funny), becomes the perfect expression of nemesis – the man who will find Humbert out and take Lolita away from him. It’s no wonder that, when Humbert shoots Quilty, he seems to refuse to die, like a character in a dream. Even though a closing legend tells us that Humbert was charged with Quilty’s murder, we never see the corpse.
26 April 2010