Word: humbert
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Following the obsession of 45-year-old Humbert Humbert (Jeremy Irons) with 12-year-old Dolores Haze (Dominique Swain) the girl Humbert dubs Lolita, the film shows Humbert doing everything in his power to be near her--even marrying Dolores' mother, Charlotte Haze (Melanie Griffith). Following Charlotte's death under questionable circumstances, Humbert takes off on a cross-country journey with his young love, only to find that he is being pursued by a mysterious stranger, Clare Quilty (Frank Langella...
...Griffith, in the role of Dolores Haze, is so flaky that we are bored of her presence all too soon. Neither is a particularly likeable character, although this seems to have been a calculated move on Lyne's part. The effect of this is to turn our sympathies to Humbert, played perfectly by Jeremy Irons, whose expressive face beautifully conveys his longings and inner torment. Reserved and elegant, Irons' character is the most thoughtful and multidimensional person in the film, so much so that we are almost compelled to try and understand his actions in spite of ourselves...
...Humbert of Lyne's movie does not say very much, as opposed to the verbose Humbert of Nabokov's book. Indeed, Nabokov takes his book's basic plot and builds layer upon layer of meaning, drowning the story line in seductive word play which, amazingly, is able to lead the reader's attention away from the moral issues underlying the book. "Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth," Humbert says by way of indroduction in the book, providing us with a glimpse...
...should be said, flat out, that Lyne's Lolita is not a movie we need to be protected from. If it offers a certain sympathetic understanding of Jeremy Irons' gently wistful Humbert Humbert, he is more than adequately punished for his nymphetomania. If Lolita, in Dominique Swain's marvelous performance--a mercurial blend of the guileful and guileless--is as much victimizer as victim, well, such creatures are not unknown in life...
...promotable edge of his Fatal Attraction or Indecent Proposal. All that, he seems to be signaling here, is behind him. He has shot Lolita in elegantly muted tones, and Ennio Morricone has given him an elegiac score redolent of the lost European world (and the lost adolescent love) that Humbert ironically seeks to recapture through his doomed passion for this child of a new world and new times (the piece is set in the late '40s, just after other children of the new world had, in a much larger sense, rescued the old one from its sins...