Lolita (1997 film)

Lolita is a 1997 drama erotic film directed by Adrian Lyne and written by Stephen Schiff. It is the second screen adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel of the same name and stars Jeremy Irons as Humbert Humbert and Dominique Swain as Dolores "Lolita" Haze, with supporting roles by Melanie Griffith as Charlotte Haze and Frank Langella as Clare Quilty.
The film is about a middle-aged professor who is sexually attracted to adolescent girls he calls "nymphets". He rents a room in the house of a young widow to get closer to her 14-year-old daughter Lo, whom he calls "Lolita". Obsessed with the girl, he eventually gains control over her after he takes her cross-country with him.
Compared to Stanley Kubrick's 1962 version, Lyne's film is more overt with many of the novel's darker elements; Kubrick chose to use suggestion and innuendo for comic purposes. Although praised by some critics for its faithfulness to Nabokov's narrative and the performances of Irons and Swain, the film received a mixed critical reception in the United States.
The film premiered in Europe in 1997 before being released in the United States in 1998 because it had difficulty finding an American distributor. It was eventually picked up by the cable network Showtime before finally being released theatrically by The Samuel Goldwyn Company. Similarly, Lolita was met with much controversy in Australia, where it was not given a theatrical release until April 1999.
In 1947, Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged European professor of English literature, travels to the United States to take a teaching position in New Hampshire. He rents a room in the home of widow Charlotte Haze, but only because he is sexually attracted to her 14-year-old daughter Dolores, also called "Lo", whom he sees while touring the house. Obsessed with girls of approximately her age (whom he calls "nymphets"), Humbert is immediately smitten with Lo and marries Charlotte only to be near her daughter.
Charlotte finds Humbert's secret diary and discovers his preference for her daughter instead of her. Furious, Charlotte tells him that she is leaving him and that he can keep her home. She then runs out of the house and is hit by a car and killed, with Humbert eventually telling Lo about her mother's death. Charlotte's death frees Humbert to pursue a romantic and sexual relationship with Lo, whom he nicknames "Lolita". Humbert and Lo then travel the country, staying in various motels before eventually settling in the college town of Beardsley, where Humbert takes a teaching job and Lo begins attending Beardsley Prep School, an all-girls Catholic school. Humbert must conceal the nature of his relationship with Lolita from everyone – strangers they encounter when traveling as well as the administration at Beardsley. He presents his relationship with Lo to the world as a father and daughter. Over time, Lo's increasing boredom with Humbert, combined with her growing desire for independence and realization of their relationship, fuels a constant tension that leads to a fight between them. Humbert's affection for Lo is also rivaled by another man, playwright Clare Quilty, who has been pursuing Lo since the beginning of the pair's travels. Lo eventually escapes with Quilty, and Humbert's search for them is unsuccessful, especially as he does not know Quilty's name.
Three years later, Humbert receives a letter from Lo asking for money. Humbert visits Lo, who is now married and pregnant. Her husband, Richard, knows nothing about her past. Humbert asks her to run away with him but she refuses, seemingly indicating that she has moved on from that part of her life and their romance. He gives her a substantial amount of money. Lo also reveals to Humbert how Quilty actually tracked young girls and took them to Pavor Manor, his home in Parkington, to exploit them for child pornography. Quilty kicked her out of his mansion after she did not want to participate in films with other men. Lo admits that she did not want to be with any man other than Quilty, stating "He was the only man I was ever really crazy about".
After he visits Lo, Humbert tracks down Quilty, who is in a drug-induced stupor and murders him after chasing him around the mansion at gunpoint. After being chased by the police, Humbert is arrested and sent to prison for the murder. He dies in prison in November 1950 due to a coronary thrombosis, and Lo dies the next month on Christmas Day from childbirth complications.
The first screen adaptation of the book, 1962's Lolita, was credited solely to Nabokov, although it was heavily revised by Stanley Kubrick and James Harris and was directed by Kubrick.
The screenplay for the 1997 version, more faithful to the text of the novel than the earlier motion picture, is credited to Stephen Schiff, a writer for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and other magazines. Schiff was hired to write it as his first movie script after the film's producers had rejected commissioned screenplays from the more experienced screenwriters and directors James Dearden (Fatal Attraction), Harold Pinter, and David Mamet. According to Schiff:
Schiff added that Kubrick's film might better have been titled Quilty, since the director had allowed the character of Quilty to "take over the movie".
Lyne states in the DVD commentary that he prefers location shooting even though it is more difficult in some respects, and that the home of Charlotte Haze was filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Lolita premiered at the San Sebastian Film Festival on 19 September 1997. It opened to the public in Italy on 26 September 1997 and grossed $676,987 from 98 screens in key Italian cities in its opening weekend, placing fourth at the Italian box office.
In the United States, it was first shown on TV via Showtime on August 2, 1998, after very scarce promotion, and premiered at 9 PM, with a brief introduction by Lyne. The following night, a Q&A with Adrian Lyne premiered along with a 16-minute making-of documentary, "The Lolita Story". Due to the difficulty in securing a distributor, the film received a limited theatrical run in the US on September 25, 1998, in order to qualify for awards. The film grossed $19,492 in its opening weekend and $1,147,784 in total in the United States and Canada. against an estimated $62 million budget.
Showtime owned the film's U.S. distribution rights for five years until the contract's expiration in 2003. The film has not been released on home video or television in the United States since. However the film is streaming on Tubi as of 2024. All non-U.S. home video releases were distributed by the film's original distributor, Pathé.
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 69% based on 26 reviews, with an average rating of 7/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "If it can't quite live up to Nabokov's words, Adrian Lyne's Lolita manages to find new emotional notes in this complicated story, thanks in large part to its solid performances." Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 46 out of 100, based on 17 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".
James Berardinelli praised the performances of the two leads, Irons and Swain, but he considered Griffith's performance weak, "stiff and unconvincing". He considered the film better when she no longer appeared in it and concluded, "Lolita is not a sex film; it's about characters, relationships, and the consequences of imprudent actions. And those who seek to brand the picture as immoral have missed the point. Both Humbert and Lolita are eventually destroyed—what could be more moral? The only real controversy I can see surrounding this film is why there was ever a controversy in the first place."
The film was The New York Times' "Critics Pick" on July 31, 1998, with its critic Caryn James saying, "Rich beyond what anyone could have expected, the film repays repeated viewings...it turns Humbert's madness into art." Writer/director James Toback lists it in his picks for the 10 finest films ever made, but he rates the original film higher.
Commenting on differences between the novel and the film, Charles Taylor, in Salon, observes that "[f]or all of their vaunted (and, it turns out, false) fidelity to Nabokov, Lyne and Schiff have made a pretty, gauzy Lolita that replaces the book's cruelty and comedy with manufactured lyricism and mopey romanticism". Extending Taylor's observation, Keith Phipps concludes: "Lyne doesn't seem to get the novel, failing to incorporate any of Nabokov's black comedy—which is to say, Lolita's heart and soul".
The film's soundtrack was composed by Ennio Morricone and released on the Music Box Records label. As the composer himself described the project: "With my music, I only had to follow on a high level the director's intentions to make Lolita a story of sincere and reciprocal love, even within the limits of the purity and malicious naiveté of its young subject."