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Lolita: The Book of the Film

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This book is a must have for anyone who has seen Lolita or for those who are unable to see it at the moment. The script by Stephen Schiff is incredible! He leaves nothing out or tries to hid anything. Every scene every word clear as a bell. I myself have not seen Lolita yet but have read the book by Nabokov. I believe Mr. Schiff stuck strickly to Nabokovs book. The photos in the book are an added bonus to fans of the film or the actors in the film. So if you happen to be a Lolita, Nabokov, or Lyne fan this is the book for you.

By "Lolita Saga" I mean not just Nabokov's fairy tale (as he says all great novels are) but the story of how the novel and the films of Lyne and Kubrick came to be. From Nabokov's novel onward, all attempts to tell the story of the doomed Humbert and the doomed Lolita (and the doomed Charlotte and the deservedly doomed Quilty) have faced headwinds from cowardly money-men and ignorant critics and censors who condemned with their eyes and ears as primly closed as their minds. Lyne's film fortunately survived those gales.

It is also worthwhile to note how Lyne's film diverges from this screenplay. Some of the scenes cut from the movie appear as "Bonus Material" on the DVD. Others just disappeared. Others were changed for filming. But all are part of the overall story of the film, and the (somewhat) conflicting visions of it's contributors.

I have a couple of nits to pick with Schiff, however. He states in the introduction that he shut himself off from earlier efforts: "My source material was the novel itself". Yet there are places where Schiff's screenplay follows Kubrick's film and/or Nabokov's screenplay but conflicts with the novel.

For instance, Humbert's reason for coming to the US in the novel is that his deceased uncle's will promised him a sizeable monthly stipend if he would come to the US and pretend to take an interest in the business. Mark Twain (and Jimmy Buffett) would say Humbert was a "Remittance Man", a black sheep paid to go away and stop embarrassing the family. In Nabokov's screenplay and Kubrick's film Humbert is a writer and distinguished scholar who comes to the US to lecture at Beardsley College. Schiff's screenplay (and Lyne's film) follow the earlier film and screenplay, not the novel.

More grievously, he says Dominique Swain "...wasn't quite beautiful". Now maybe I'm one of those "tortured artists" who know a nymphet when they see one and Schiff isn't. But there are 50-odd screenshots within Lyne's film in which Dominique Swain appears not only as beautiful but as heart-stoppingly so. Schiff's description might fit DS as she appeared in her later films, but to me part of the mystique of the Lyne film is that he cast Dominique Swain as Lolita while Swain was in her all-too-brief "nymphet stage", then she moved on like a Nabokov butterfly, fortunately leaving behind for us her magnificent portrayal of Lolita, recorded for the ages.

As Humbert (or is it Nabokov?) says in finality, "And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita".

And so it is!

There's a very brief entry by Jeremy Irons, a slightly longer one by Lyne that deals with the travails of the film following its release after everyone's heroic effort to get it made, then Peter Schiff's longer introduction that covers much of the same ground in greater detail. The bulk of the book is made up of the shooting script -- the scenes as they were written and filmed -- before the actual editing and trimming, plus a lot of real estate devoted to screen shots from the film.

I said Schiff's essay gives us greater detail but "greater" is such a relative term. It's clear that getting the production funded, filmed, and marketed was a nightmare, but I'd have liked to know more about some of the pre-production decisions regarding the movie as movie -- not as so much of the public (and professionals) saw it, a rabble-rousing endorsement of pedophilia. Schiff tells us that Irons was the obvious choice for Humbert. Fine, but why? And what made Dominique Swain stand out from the thousands of other young girls whose mothers would willingly have them debauched on screen? Well -- we don't find out.

The rest of the book is in many ways more interesting than the introductory sections. It follows pretty closely the dialog and events we see in the finished product but the excisions are fascinating in themselves. What a country of blue noses we are. The scene in which HH has his first orgasm with Lolita on the Sunday living room couch is gone, for instance.

Too much forbidden sex, although Lolita may be unaware of what happens. But the climactic killing of Quilty, with all its agony and its oceans of gore, is intact. It's okay to shoot a man in cold blood, to put innumerable holes through his naked body, and to show it realistically -- but don't touch a fourteen-year-old knee.

The script presented here follows the novel far more closely than Kubrick's did. In some ways it's a weakness because a lot of what goes on in the novel isn't spelled out in the dialog, only in HH's descriptions of it, as Schiff points out. This requires that some original dialog be added, and the writers (who included at one point David Mamet) do a pretty good job of it. It's tough enough to squeeze a classic novel into the shape of a movie. Joseph Strick tried it with "Ulysses" and it was a dismal failure. Lyne's "Lolita" more closely approaches success.

I was reminded of another attempt to shape a long and complex novel into a film: "The Caine Mutiny." In the book, Captain Queeg's paranoia gradually reveals itself in a series of related incidents of enough intricacy that they simply couldn't be depicted in the movie. So, early on, during the first wardroom meeting, Queeg's neurotic behavior is adumbrated in a single statement. He's describing his experiences in the Atlantic and adds: "The way those subs ganged up on us, I thought they had it in for me persnally." To me, that represents skillfull screen writing and the script of "Lolita" shows it in abundance.

Yet, by sticking to the events of the novel as closely as it does, the script misses something. It misses the same thing that Strick's version of "Ulysses" did. "Lolita" is, at base, a serious and even tragic story, but not as HH tells it. A few earnest passages aside, it's hilarious. But the script can't capture most of the comic turns taken by Nabokov's prose. What little humor there is, is confined to a few brief moments -- the mix-ups over HH's name, for instance. At the Beardsley School for Girls the headmistress addresses him as "Professor Himmler." And at the Enchanted Hunters, he coldly informs the clerk that "the name is not Humbug but Herbert -- I mean Humbert."

And, man, does this script need some of the novel's humor. Kubrick at least had a non-canonical Peter Sellers in five different roles. (Some were more successful than others.) And it had an African-American hotel porter wrestling with a fold-up cot that insisted on reverting to its more compact form.

Lyne's movie has none of Sellers' outrageous hamminess and no slapstick. And the absence of that ludic element turns the script into a somewhat gloomy love story. The moody musical score helps keep it there. So does the photography which is too often dark, foggy, and rainy, whereas Nabokov's novel was full of sunshine, beaches, vast furrowed plains, and craggy mountains.

Okay. At its base, it's a tragedy. We know that. But why remove the one element that makes it more than that? I guess, in a way, it can't be helped. HH was pretty snotty, and contemptuous of almost everyone he met, but that was all internally edited by him. Outwardly he was polite and a little distant in a proper aristocratic way. His demeanor was phony but deliberately so, and the irony of the contrast between his amused contempt and his interactional delicacy is gone.

I suppose this is about as good as it can get. There is always so much more to a work of fiction than what we see on the screen, at least as far as a classic work like "Lolita" is concerned. Hitchcock's movie of "Psycho" was actually an improvement over Robert Bloch's unimaginative story.

No comment on those who find the novel or either film version offensive because the story is an endorsement of pedophilia, or because it encourages statutory rape or something.

Obviously you did not really read Lolita. The depiction of Humbert in this film was brilliant and Jeremy irons did an amazing job. Here are a few reasons why you know nothing. 1. You read Lolita because someone told you to and they also told you what to expect. 2. If you expected someone to be able to include every aspect of a 309 page novel in a two hour movie, your expectations are far too high. They included the key elements to capture the true feel of the novel. 3. This movie should be praised for Dominique Swain's performance alone. She played the part perfect. 4. Get off your "Nabokov-knowing-high-horse." I think that you need to make a movie based on a Nabokov novel before you can say anything negative. Try "Despair" out and we see how far youg get.

Having just seen Lyne's film of "Lolita," I must say that even though I am a devout Kubrick fan, I admit it surpasses his weak 1962 film by a longshot. Jeremy Irons brings out all of Humbert's excruciating obsession; The young Dominique Swain is a lovely Lolita who perfectly captures her seductiveness and childishness at the same time. The film brims with wonderful moments; you almost feel guilty for feeling so good about a movie that deels with such subjects!

I DID really read Lolita - five times in fact - and I wholly concur with the man who said this movie stinks: Adrian Lyne's movie is a dangerously naive misreading of Nabokov's masterpiece. The strength of Nabokov's novel is the tension between Humbert Humbert's equilibristic depiction of his "relationship" with Lolita as an essentially unhappy love affair and of himself as a spurned lover, and Nabokov's subtle - and even more equilibristic - depiction of Humbert as an egocentric, manipulating monster. Nabokov himself called Humbert "a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear touching". Humbert manages this through his undoubted rhetoric skills. He simply writes enormously well, and his powers of persuasion have led many a naive reader to accept his version of the story at face value (such as Lyne and Schiff have done). Through his subtle undercutting, however, Nabokov lets the good reader see what a ridiculous monster Humbert really is. Nabokov lets Humbert praise himself a couple of times too many, he lets him speak a little bit too much French, etc., and through this brilliant, unobtrusive undermining of Humbert's own story, Nabokov demasks his own narrator. Lyne and Schiff completely miss this crucial aspect of the novel, and consequently their movie tells a deeply problematic story about an unhappy love affair between a 12-year-old girl and an adult man, rather than - as Nabokov did - telling a story about an evil, but eloquent, man who manipulates everyone around him, including the naive reader.
Nabokov's novel was something of a scandal when it came out, but by taking Humbert at his word, Lyne's and Schiff's movie is even more scandalous. Even though their movie is closer to the words of Nabokov's novel than Kubrick's adaptation, it is very far from the dark spirit of the book. Nabokov's novel (and Kubrick's version) is a dark comedy; Lyne and Schiff's version is a pink, sentimental melodrama.

Anyone who has actually READ Nabokov's Lolita understands the character of Humbert Humbert far better than Adrian Lyne did and much better than Jeremy Irons. This movie (and screenplay) captures next to nothing of what Nabokov was attempting to tell. Instead of a witty, sarcastic, intelligent, and clever book on the timeless (and ageless) nature of love, you get a sappy, sentimental, two hours of Jeremy Irons weeping and moaning that adds up to nothing more than a movie that, if it hadn't been for the subject matter, would have been a movie of the week- AT BEST. Gimme a break. This movie stinks.