I am a huge fan of the novel---in fact, I think it's the best written novel in the English language. That's maybe one of the reasons I've held off on seeing the film. It can't be faithfully translated to screen, because the effect depends entirely on Humbert's 1st person narration, and the ambiguity created by his unreliable narration. It seems that ambiguity would disappear if everything were being shown to the audience as if they were spectators, rather than through Humbert's distorted lens. Having said that, Nabokov actually wrote the screenplay himself. I am sure he realized that it was unfilmable as written, and therefore wanted to control the direction the adaptation would take. Some changes (like Lolita's age) were made to please the censors; Kubrick made other changes on his own. Nabokov accepted Kubrick's alterations with "reluctant pleasure," which is probably the highest praise any writer has ever given to changes to his own script of his own novel.
What amazes me about the writing in the novel is that English was its author's fourth language. How eloquent must Nabokov have been in the other three?
As for the movies....it says something that Peter Sellers, one of the greatest actors ever, IMHO, stole the show with so little screen time. The re-make.... I don't know, it was like a beautiful plane that never took off.
It puzzles me today to read the comment I made up above on
Lolita back in 2008. I don't disagree with what I wrote then, but it feels strange to see it now.
I'm all about free expression of ideas, and I don't think the subject of
Lolita was inappropriate within its context, and I think just about any story someone wants to tell is fair game, but it's less cool than it's perceived to be in
Lolita to be a kid and have an adult have an attraction to you, and it happened to me more than once, including with someone supposedly in a position of trust associated with my high school (which may be one reason I dislike schools so much, shrug).
But the thing that I think about when I contemplate the message of
Lolita, the alleged glam Humbert believed existed in his attraction to a child, is how I was close to a bad situation when I was thirteen and in my own downstairs family room while my parents had a party upstairs. Some man came down and skipped flirting and went straight into sexual harassment mode and it was gross and disturbing, not flattering to be some adult's sex object.
Sure, I mean a minute later after I blurted out my age he was like, "Wait, you're thirteen? I figured you were seventeen."
As if that made it all right. No harm, no foul. Right.
In fact a psychologist got on my case just last month about how my not telling anybody about these incidents at the time said something deeply negative about me. Well, I was a kid and I was embarrassed, that's about all I can say there.
So I don't know, maybe I was slightly tainted on
Lolita by the time I got to it in college but I never warmed to the novel or the films, though I do completely agree Nabokov was a wordsmith with few modern peers.