Lolita: The Book of the Film (Applause Books) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)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.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Lolita: The Book of the Film (Applause Books)

Product Description:
Foreward by Jeremy Irons and preface by Adrian Lyne. Based on the novel by Vladimir Nabokov. In the introduction to the Applause LOLITA, Schiff tells the astounding story behind the most controversial movie of our time.

Get 10% OFF

Want to read more honest consumer review about Lolita: The Book of the Film (Applause Books) now ?