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, Dominique Swain, Melanie Griffith

2 wins & 4 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

In early adolescence, Humbert fell hopelessly and tragically in love with a girl his own age, and, as he grew into adulthood, he never lost his obsession with "nymphets," teenagers who walk a fine line between being a girl and a woman. While looking for a place to live after securing a new teaching position, he meets Charlotte Haze (Melanie Griffith), a pretentious and annoying woman who seems desperately lonely and is obviously attracted to Humbert. Humbert pays her little mind until he meets her 13-year-old daughter Lolita (Dominique Swain), the image of the girl that Humbert once loved. Humbert moves into the Haze home as a boarder and eventually marries Charlotte in order to be closer to Lolita. When Charlotte finds out about Humbert's attraction to her daughter, she flees the house in a rage, only to be killed in an auto accident. Without telling Lolita of her mother's fate, Humbert takes her on a cross-country auto trip, where their relationship begins to move beyond the ...

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Plot Keywords:

14 year old | lolita | promiscuous daughter | forbidden love | underage girl | 

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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

Country:

USA France

Language:

English

Release Date:

25 September 1998 (USA)

Also Known As:

Лолита

Filming Locations:

New Orleans Athletic Club, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

Box Office

Budget:

$62,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend USA:

$19,492, 26 July 1998, Limited Release

Gross USA:

$1,400,000

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

In the novel, Lolita is only 12 when Humbert first meets her. In the film, her age was changed to 14. The same thing happened in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962).

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Goofs

In the jawbreaker scene, the jawbreaker is at first bright yellow, then in the next shot, is white. However, jawbreakers often change color as they are sucked, so it is conceivable that the yellow layer had melted off, revealing the white underneath.

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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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Alternate Versions

Though Dawn Mauer was used as a body double for all nude scenes featuring Lolita (Dominique Swain), director Adrian Lyne bowed to public pressure and cut all of them from the film for its U.S. release. They reportedly exist in its original European release.

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Connections

Featured in Indie Sex: Extremes (2007)

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Soundtracks

Night On Bald Mountain
Written by Modest Mussorgsky
Arranged by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Performed by Orchestre de la Suisse Romande (as L'Orchestre de Suisse Romande)
Conducted by Ernest Ansermet

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!