LOLITA (47)

Directed by: Adrian Lyne

Starring: Jeremy Irons, Dominique Swain, Melanie Griffith, Frank Langella

The Pitch: Middle-aged professor Humbert Humbert is obsessed with pubescent "nymphets" - and especially the delectable Lolita.

Theo Sez: The controversy over this rather plodding adaptation of a magnificent novel will presumably (or at least hopefully) raise many a guffaw among future generations - if only because this is the most moral version of the story imaginable. Unlike the book, which was on the outside looking in - laced with a wry intellectual amusement at the farcical excesses of human sexuality - this is absolutely drenched in the guilt of pedophilia, suffering right along with its hero : its central image (repeated more or less ad nauseam) is of Irons's pinched, rather self-pitying face as the mischievous Swain flounces brattily around him, Humbert struggling to repress the wicked thoughts tearing through his mind. That our hero isn't a monster but a tragic figure at the mercy of his unhealthy impulses is the film's Big Idea, and Lyne pumps up his already pumped-up style to suggest the grandeur of Humbert's suffering (he's not just a dirty old man, oh no), even though this necessarily short-circuits the biting satire that made the novel so great : Nabokov's hilarious (if supercilious) joke was that Humbert's crimes pale next to the awfulness of small-town America - but it's hard to grasp the horror of, for example, Lolita's summer camp (where, in the book, each cabin was "dedicated to a Disney creature") when what we see are beautiful shafts of light filtering through a canopy of trees. The film is at its best when it finds some counterpoint to the central passion, whether in the hopelessly square 50s billboards Hum and Lo pass on the road or the dinky motels they stay in, featuring such kitschy extras as the "Magic Fingers massage system" in every room - when, in other words, it swaps tragedy for sardonic observation. Shame the jokes aren't wittier ("She keeping you up?" enquires Lolita's mother of our hero, moments after the naughty nymphet has crawled off his lap), or that the ending is so silly ; or, of course, that irrational puritanism has elevated a so-so movie into a cause celebre. Fifty bucks says the US distributors just smelled a flop and decided they'd be better off going for the moral brownie-points.