I’m a big Stanley Kubrick fan, though truth be told, I don’t like every single thing he’s ever done. 2001 baffles me even after multiple viewings, and I figure I should probably revisit Eyes Wide Shut one of these days to see if I can appreciate it for what it is now because I sure couldn’t when it was a relatively new film. However, I do have my fair number of gaps in my Kubrick experience.
Lucky for me, his take on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is currently available on Netflix.
Opening with James Mason’s Humbert Humbert chasing Peter Sellers’s Clare Quilty around a mansion that has clearly seen better days before flashing back to show how Mason got there, this is the movie about a man who falls in love with a teenager. The name “Lolita” has since entered the lexicon for a teenage girl who seduces an older man. And while I have not yet read Nabotov’s work (I have a copy to get to at some point), I think it’s fair to say that’s a really wrong take on things.
That comes down to how Lotlia is portrayed in the movie and, I suspect, the novel as well. Actress Sue Lyon was only 14 when she played the title role, and it’s reflected rather accurately in how she behaves. Dolores “Lolita” Haze isn’t the slightest bit of a seductress. She never makes a move on Humbert of any kind. Anything and everything that is going on is all his head. About the closest she comes to seducing Humbert is when she apparently lets him paint her toenails or maybe that she was wearing a two piece bathing suit while sunbathing when he met her. Otherwise, she acts very much like a child, appropriate since aside from her final scene set four years later, she is a child. Humbert just looks at her and goes funny in this head.
And that’s where this movie shines, if “shines” is the right word. Humbert is a highly possessive and controlling man. Lolita is only just starting to get interested in boys, and she’s actually looking at boys her own age. Humbert, meanwhile, takes a room for rent from Lolita’s mother Charlotte (Shelley Winters at her best romantically desperate) before marrying her. The audience is fully aware Humbert’s interest is in the daughter and not the mother, and when Charlotte figures that out, she does the reasonable thing and runs off into the rain to be struck and killed by a car. And it gets even creepier from there.
Lolita is a great depiction of possessiveness and attempted control. Lolita never asks for what happens and reacts in ways that are generally childish, highly appropriate since she is a child. It makes Mason’s creepy Humbert all the more monstrous for what he does. How anyone could see something like this and use the Lolita name to refer to a seductress is beyond me. This Lolita is anything but.
I really need to read this book. I’ll have to get to it next year. A student of mine read it this past semester and she was a bit…shocked about it would probably be the best word.
But as for the movie, it’s the usual Kubrick work of alienation with its subjects, and it has only one real flaw. That would be Sellers. His performance is just a little too cartoonish for the rest of the movie. He’s in full-on comedy mode from the looks of things, and I didn’t think this movie was meant to be all that funny, even if the lead character has an intentionally ridiculous name like “Humbert Humbert”. This story is a bit too creepy to be all that funny.
Then again, Kurbick’s idea of comedy was apparently a nuclear war, so what do I know?
Grade: A-
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