Lolita

"How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?" -Lolita, movie tagline.

Consider the following scenario. You are a penniless scriptwriter, come to Los Angeles to make your name, and trapped almost instantaneously in a squalid spiral of indenturing debts. Fleeing the repo men who are attempting to take possession of the only material asset makes your miserable life bearable -your car- you make a fateful turn into 10086 Sunset Boulevard, there to hide out in the garage of a derelict mansion until the coast is clear. What you DON'T realise, however, is that the external decrepitude of the abode is merely symbolic, a foreshadowing of the painful, prolonged death-rattle that is the life of its owner, a washed-up Hollywood superstar of yesteryear pathetically planning their triumphant comeback- to wit, me. "I have an idea for a movie based on Oedipus Rex," I tell you, seeking to draw you into my bleak and macabre life-in-death, "Only I'm a little squeamish about this whole killing his father and marrying his mother business. Why don't we just leave that out?" What would you say? Chances are that you would hurl yourself at me with a blood-curdling war-cry of "You CRETIN! If it wasn't for patricide and incest no-one would have HEARD of Oedipus Rex because nothing would HAPPEN in it!!!", swinging your fist like a curveball at the inviting target that is my face- although chances equally are that I, being deceptively quick for an aging relic of a bygone era, would easily block your attempt upon my person and reply with the right haymaker that Bogie taught me on the set of The Big Sleep. But the obliterating pain of having your jaw fractured in three places simultaneously would undoubtedly be anaesthestized by the sure knowledge that you were right and that, when my big screen comeback crashed and burned like a patchwork zeppelin, the last laugh -and not for the first time- would be wheezed through your malformed and wire-padded maw. "Cuh!" you'd smile, rather lopsidedly, "That Thomas and his big ideas! What will he come up with next; Lolita, only without the paedophilia? Haw haw haw!" And you'd laugh, LAUGH out of the corner of your mouth that wasn't held together with staples and metal plates- but, thanks to Stanley Kubrick, it wouldn't be long before you were LAUGHING OUT OF THE OTHER SIDE OF YOUR FACE.

Kubrick's Lolita is a comedy about a man who marries a woman because he is in love with her daughter. That's it. Like directors of Romeo and Juliet since time immemorial, Kubrick tackles the problem of his heroine's age by casting an actress who looks old enough to render the action more or less decent and studiously avoiding or glossing every textual indication that the character is younger than, say, ooh, 16 or 17. Everything that is murky, subterranean or sordid about Humbert Humbert's relationship with young Miss Haze is here swept under the carpet, and everything interesting along with it- Kubrick's characters and events are just screens, cardboard cut-outs, glove puppets and laugh factories. That's not to say this Lolita is revoltingly unfaithful to the plot of Nabokov's; but the effect is rather as if someone adapted the deterministic downfall of Tess Durbeyfield as a slapstick comedy about a girl for whom everything that can go wrong does go wrong, and in the most ludicrously absurd ways. Nabokov's Lolita is funny, but there is something more than a little bloody-minded about playing it for laughs.

Fundamentally, if Kubrick is to play Lolita as a straightforward comedy, he needs no more vindication than the laughter of his audience. What disappointment, then, that his means of inspiring it should be so limited. After squeezing every drop of contrived fun out of the hen-pecked husband/social-climbing wife combination of James Mason (Humbert) and Shelley Winters (Charlotte Haze), Kubrick is left with little more of a comic impetus than the constant pinpricking of Humbert's puffed-up austerity and the irreverant smirking of Sue Lyons (Lolita). Peter Sellers is hilarious as Clare Quilty, but he is called upon to inject a little life into the lethargic proceedings too often for Kubrick's reliance on him to be construed as anything other than a sign of directorial weakness. Humbert's final confrontation with Quilty is undoubtedly the most adequately realised episode of the movie- but, Dr. Strangelove apart, humour is not instinctive to Kubrick, and Sellers' scene-stealing provides the only genuinely amusing moments in the film.

The truth is simply that Kubrick's Lolita is a mystery. Why choose the dark, inscrutable depths of the relationship of Dolores Haze and Humbert Humbert as the subject of a movie only to froth over the top of it with candy floss? Kubrick's conversion of Peter Scott's novel Red Alert into Strangelove worked because the humour was not self-explanatory and self-sufficient- the end to which each joke aimed was not simply the joke itself. Lolita's humour, on the other hand, doesn't even get as far as the joke itself, most of the time. How did they ever make a movie out of Lolita? Why, by waiting 35 years and casting Jeremy Irons in a vastly superior production. But why did they ever make a movie out of Lolita? Heaven -and Stanley Kubrick- only know.