Lolita (1997)

A man marries his landlady so he can take advantage of her daughter.

Director:

Adrian Lyne

Writers:

Vladimir Nabokov (novel), Stephen Schiff (screenplay)

Stars:

Jeremy Irons, Melanie Griffith, Frank Langella

2 wins & 3 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Jeremy Irons	...	Humbert Humbert
Melanie Griffith	...	Charlotte Haze
Frank Langella	...	Clare Quilty
Dominique Swain	...	Dolores 'Lolita' Haze
Suzanne Shepherd	...	Miss Pratt
Keith Reddin	...	Reverend Rigger
Erin J. Dean	...	Mona
Joan Glover	...	Miss LaBone
Pat Pierre Perkins	...	Louise (as Pat P. Perkins)
Ed Grady	...	Dr. Melinik
Michael Goodwin	...	Mr. Beale
Angela Paton	...	Mrs. Holmes
Ben Silverstone	...	Young Humbert Humbert
Emma Griffiths Malin	...	Annabel Lee (as Emma Griffiths-Malin)
Ronald Pickup	...	Young Humbert's Father

Storyline

Humbert Humbert, a British professor coming to the US to teach, rents a room in Charlotte Haze's house, but only after he sees her 14-year-old daughter, Dolores (Lolita), to whom he is immediately attracted. Though he hates the mother, he marries her as this is the only way to be close to the girl, who will prove to be too mature for her age. They start a journey together, trying to hide they're not just (step)father and daughter, throughout the country, being followed by someone whom Humbert first suspects to be from the police. The profound jealousy, and maybe some guilt from the forbidden love, seem slowly to drive the man emotionally labile.

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Plot Keywords:

police | professor | love | lolita | 14 year old | 

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Taglines:

Forbidden, Provocative, Unforgettable.

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Genres:

Drama | Romance

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Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated R for aberrant sexuality, a strong scene of violence, nudity and some language

Details

Official Sites:

Pathe

Country:

USA France

Language:

English

Release Date:

25 September 1998 (USA)

Also Known As:

Lolita de Adrian Lyne

Filming Locations:

Austin High School - 3500 Memphis Avenue, El Paso, Texas, USA

Box Office

Budget:

$58,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend:

$19,492 (USA) (24 July 1998)

Gross:

$1,060,056 (USA) (20 November 1998)

Company Credits

Production Co:

Guild, Lolita Productions, Pathé

Technical Specs

Runtime:

137 min

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital SDDS

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

The film had a hard time in finding a distributor. When filming finally began, New Line Cinema was the distributor, but they dropped the film from distribution when they saw an early cut. It later got a limited cinema run, through a small independent distributor, before finally making a big premiere on the Showtime Entertainment TV channel.

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Goofs

Lolita and Hum arrive in gas station with license plates which are black with white numbers. When the tire blows on the road, the car is shown with different plates beginning with the letters "AC".

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Quotes

[first lines]
Humbert: [voiceover] She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks, she was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always - Lolita. Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin. My soul.
[whispered]
Humbert: Lolita.

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Crazy Credits

After the credits are over there is a brief clip where Lolita is shown juggling a red apple.

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Connections

Version of Lolita (1962)

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Soundtracks

"Stardust"
Written by Hoagy Carmichael
Performed by Artie Shaw

User Reviews

Worth seeing if you love the novel

Nabokov's best novel save for Pale Fire will probably never get an "ideal" filming, unless someone decides to actually commit Nabokov's own script to celluloid (he wrote it for the 1962 version, and his name appears in the credits, but the finished product was almost wholly the product of Kubrick's pen and Peter Sellers' ad-libbing). But I like both the Kubrick and the Lyne versions, with reservations.

With Kubrick's, the only real problem is that it's not Nabokov. James Mason's performance contains the core of an accurate portrayal of Humbert, and he's often moving. But Sue Lyon was too old for her part and Sellers' Quilty is an altogether different conception from the author's (not that he isn't lots of fun). The film also suffers from having been filmed in the UK. Nabokov had a complex vision of America - vast, tacky, seductive, and grindingly mundane all at the same time - and this just can't be conveyed in a studio and with a few well-chosen locations.

That's where Lyne's version excels. His compositions (or his cinematographer's) are indeed beautiful to look at, and (I think) capture suburban and roadside America very much the way Humbert would have experienced them. Irons is fine as Humbert, although the typecasting was initially painful to contemplate, and Swain is a vast improvement over Lyon as young Dolores: still a bit too old for the part (an inevitable problem, perhaps, for anyone who wants to film this book), but her intelligent performance makes up for this. Despite his cheesy reputation, Lyne wisely refrains from making his Lolita a teenage bombshell, something the more artistic Kubrick couldn't resist.

Again, however, the problem is Quilty. Both directors obviously felt compelled to render in three dimensions a character who is one of Nabokov's phantoms: Does he really exist? Who is he and what do we know about him, outside of Humbert's increasingly paranoid imaginings? Can we trust anything at all that's said about him in this book? I expect that Nabokov himself regretted having to bring Quilty out of the shadows at all for the denouement.

Sellers carried off the role with style, making you forget for a moment that his routines seem to have wandered in from another film. Lyne turns the final confrontation between Humbert and Quilty (there is no flashback framing device, as in Kubrick) into pure Grand Guignol, and so we have to endure watching poor, paunchy Frank Langella running down a hallway of his ridiculously overstuffed house, his bathrobe falling open to reveal his endowments to our embarrassed gaze before being blown away Dirty Harry-style by the avenging Humbert. A major wrong note to say the least.

So Quilty, in the end, defeats both of Nabokov's filmic approximators. But if you love the book, see both movies: Kubrick and Lyne each capture different aspects of the master's great story in valuable ways, and the new Lolita is clearly Lyne's best work yet, proving that a great novel can inspire excellent filmmaking, if not guarantee an "ideal" adaptation.

What we really need now, however, is not a third version of Lolita, but finally, a filming of Lolita: A Screenplay. Nabokov had fun writing this, and any fan of his should read his script as well. Wouldn't you like to see a move of Lolita in which Humbert, searching through the woods for his Lo, encounters a butterfly collector named Vladimir Nabokov? Of course you would!