LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Adrian Lyne: Humbert Humbert
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When Adrian Lyne began working on Lolita, Nabokov's book had sold fourteen million copies, yet, like any book made into a movie, it was better known for its filmed version, from which Kubrick excised Humbert's torturous history. Lyne had it reinstated, since this account, while not excusing Humbert's behavior, served to explain it and was so essential to understanding the material that Nabokov put it in the novel's opening pages: As a child, Humbert adored another child, Annabel Leigh. She was thirteen when she died of typhus. Humbert continued to seek her long after his own childhood concluded. "The poison was in the wound," says Humbert, "and the wound remained ever open."
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Schiff and Lyne keep some of Humbert's first-person narration, but omit the irony which gives it not only its shape but, arguably, its primary reason for being. A decisive indication of just how grievously the movie strays from the novel lies in the casting of Jeremy Irons. An actor who once excelled at playing complex depressives, Irons has lately displayed a gift for essaying quiescent moral rot. (He brings to mind one of those louche European types who routinely show up in novels claiming royal extraction while picking pockets.) This new Humbert isn't Nabokov's artful strategizer, maneuvering Lolita's legs into friction with his crotch and marrying her poor mother, but a flaccid spectator to his own misadventures. As a consequence, Irons - eyes widening and narrowing - fluctuates between alarm and cowlike passivity, but never registers a flicker of cunning, much less lust.
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ADRIAN LYNE is the archetypal director who graduated from TV commercials to feature films. When word came of his version of Lolita, some expected a commercial for pedophilia, but that is not the case. The rumor that Lolita was not good enough to be released to theaters (it showed on cable and is now getting limited big-screen showings) was a face-saving excuse invented by the various studios that passed on the film. (Worse than Nine 1/2 Weeks, Flashdance and Indecent Proposal? Yet all of these Lyne films were released, more's the pity.) Lolita, based on Vladimir Nabokov's novel, is set in the U.S. shortly after WWII. A European professor named Humbert Humbert encounters a nubile, underaged American girl named Dolores Haze, nicknamed Lolita, and ends up both lover and [I]n loco parentis.
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Lyne has been able to elicit strong performances from Jeremy Irons, as Humbert, and the 15-year-old Dominique Swain, as Lolita. Swain is extraordinary, capturing the optimism and spontaneity of a precocious teenage girl, her life and childhood cruelly shattered by the secret and destructive relationship with Humbert. Irons displays an emotional range and flexibility not seen in previous film roles, subtly shifting from the calculating to the vulnerable, from the cruel to the hopeless romantic. He portrays a man obsessively jealous and paranoid, yet capable of intense remorse and subtle understated humour.
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When he tested for Humbert, he had a moment that assured Adrian Lyne that his instinct about Irons was faultless. "It was that moment when you know Humbert's a beaten man," Lyne told him. Once Irons took the role, Humbert Humbert seemed the point toward which he had long been tending.
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Undaunted by the prospect of a semi-literate American culture, Lyne next revisited Nabokov's Lolita with the intent of staying true to the book's themes glossed over by Kubrick in his 1962 version. His 1997 version of Lolita is closer to Nabakov’s—owing nothing to his predecessor—faithfully exploring the theme of redemption driven by true love forever lost, and the tragedy of a stunted maturity desperately thirsting for an elixir through the fount of a nymph proxy. Occasionally sentimental, Lyne makes few concessions and to his credit never glosses over Humbert's own cruelty toward Lo's mother in order to stay close to the object of his desire, the one who fails him, Lolita.
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