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Lolita (1997 film)

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Lolita

Directed by	Adrian Lyne
Produced by	Mario Kassar Joel B. Michaels
Written by	Stephen Schiff
Starring	Jeremy Irons, Melanie Griffith, Dominique Swain, Frank Langella
Music by	Ennio Morricone
Cinematography	Howard Atherton, Stephen Smith (France)
Editing by	David Brenner, Julie Monroe
Distributed by	various
Release date(s)	September 27 1997
Running time	137 min.
Country	USA
Language	English
IMDb profile

Lolita is a 1997 film directed by Adrian Lyne and was the second screen adaptation of the novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The film stars Jeremy Irons as Humbert Humbert and Dominique Swain (15 years old during filming) as Dolores "Lolita" Haze. Supporting roles are Melanie Griffith, playing Charlotte Haze, and Frank Langella as Clare Quilty.

1 History
2 Plot outline
3 Reception and controversy
4 Differences from the novel
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

History

The screenplay was written by Stephen Schiff, and the film has a score by Ennio Morricone. Schiff was commissioned to write the screenplay after scripts by James Dearden, David Mamet and Harold Pinter had been rejected by the producers. The first adaptation of Lolita was the 1962 version directed by Stanley Kubrick. Stephen Schiff, screenwriter of the 1997 version, has commented that, “Right from the beginning, it was clear to all of us that this movie was not a 'remake' of Kubrick's film. Rather, we were out to make a new adaptation of a very great novel”. He added that, “Some of the filmmakers involved actually looked upon the Kubrick version as a kind of 'what not to do'”, and quipped that Kubrick's film should have been called "Quilty" due to the prominent role of that character. Despite Schiff's confidence, the 1997 film was refused release by all the major Hollywood studios, many of whom may have feared legal action arising from the passage of the ambiguously worded Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996. However, the film earned a large number of viewers when it aired on Showtime, and fared well in VHS and DVD sales and rentals.

Plot outline

Humbert Humbert, a divorced British professor of French literature, travels to New Hampshire, America for a teaching position. He allows himself to be swept into a relationship with Charlotte Haze, his widowed and sexually famished landlady of the home he is residing at, whom he marries in order that he might pursue the woman's 14-year-old (12 in the novel) flirtatious daughter, Lolita, with whom he has fallen hopelessly in love. However, Humbert's affections shall be rivaled by a devious trickster named Clare Quilty, by whom Lolita is eventually kidnapped.

Reception and controversy

The film was produced on a budget of just over USD$62 million, and had a great deal of trouble finding a distributor in the United States, reportedly due to the widespread disapproval of pedophilia and strong sexuality, though this has been disputed. New Line Cinema were originally set to distribute it in America, but after seeing early footage of the film, they pulled out concerned over the content. It eventually premiered on the Showtime television network, where it drew an unusually wide audience — a near-record for Showtime — and then had a subsequent limited theatrical release, where it took in approximately $1 million. The film was not released in Australia, until 1999, with censors in the country concerned of the pedophilia-related content, it was finally released there in June of 1999, with an R18+ rating, and did moderately well in a limited Australian release. Reviews were mixed, with some critics considering the film more faithful to the letter of the novel than the spirit. Critics such as James Berardinelli, however, praised the film, particularly for the performances of the two leads ^[1], and New York Times critic Caryn James championed the film, though noted that it was "dully repetitious in the last 40 minutes" ^[2]. Writer and director James Toback has listed it in his picks for the ten finest films ever made ^[3].

Differences from the novel

The film was publicized as an attempt to be faithful to the original novel, and the events of the film do match the events of the novel quite closely. Some critics and readers of the novel complained, however, that in taking such a reverent approach, many of the more subtle aspects of the novel, such as the unreliability of Humbert's narration, were lost. Many also thought that much of the humorous and tragic irony of the novel — which comes largely from the differences between Humbert's self-image and his action — was lost, since the movie essentially offers up Humbert's narration as fact. The critic Charles Taylor, for example, said of the film, "For all of their vaunted (and, it turns out, false) fidelity to Nabokov, Lyne and Schiff have made a pretty, gauzy Lolita that replaces the book's cruelty and comedy with manufactured lyricism and mopey romanticism." ^[4], and Keith Phipps wrote that "Lyne doesn't seem to get the novel, failing to incorporate any of Nabokov's black comedy — which is to say, Lolita's heart and soul" ^[5]. Another major deviation is the depiction of Lolita as highly attractive. Several characters in the novel, including her own mother and Humbert himself, comment on Lolita's lack of conventional attractiveness, and it is hinted that this is why greater suspicion does not fall on Humbert. The look of Lolita in the film was not in any way faithful to how she is described in the book. In the book, she is described by Humbert as having dark chestnut brown curls, and that she had honey-tanned skin. In the film, Lolita/Dominique Swain is much more the "sexy schoolgirl" stereotype, with reddish blonde hair in braids and pigtails, and the film puts a visual emphasis on the orthodontic retainer she wears for her teeth, while Lolita doesn't wear braces in the book.