My Year of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure

by Nathan Rabin

  Kubrick felt Lolita dragged after Humbert and his Lolita consummate their strange, cursed union, so he essentially skips directly from the hell of Humbert being around Lo without being able to consummate their strange bond to the torment of being at the mercy of a petulant, bratty lover who can destroy his life with a few words to a teacher or a policeman. He doesn’t allow our antihero even a few moments of carnal heaven in between. In a 1969 interview with Joseph Gelmis, Kubrick said he bitterly regretted not being able to do justice to the erotic elements of the novel; he also reflected that he’d never have made the movie if he’d known the kind of restrictions censors would impose on his work.

  While Kubrick gives us an understandably sexless Lolita, there’s also a lot about it he gets right, beginning with the casting. Few actors convey inner torment like James Mason. In the 1956 Nicholas Ray masterpiece Bigger Than Life, Mason plunges deep into a moral abyss as a man driven so megalomaniacal by cortisone and the all-American lust for success that he’s willing, even eager, to murder his son to make a point. So playing a man who lives to fuck little girls is a cakewalk by comparison.

  The supporting roles are cast with equal aplomb. Shelley Winters engages in brilliant self-parody as a tragically tacky housewife convinced she’s an intellectual. In Nabokov’s brilliant turn of phrase, she’s a “handsome woman” who represents to Humbert the infinite horrors, physical (womanly hips, full breasts, and wrinkled, sagging skin) and psychological, of the adult woman.

  The casting of Peter Sellers proved even more inspired. Beefing up the Claire Quilty role remains the only way either Kubrick’s film or the 1997 adaptation improved on the source material. In the book, Quilty functions as a ghost, a phantom whose presence is felt throughout but whose actual appearances are sporadic. He’s Humbert’s shadow self, a double who trumps him in every sense. Humbert writes and teaches about art; Quilty creates it. Humbert must pay for Lo’s body; she willingly gives Quilty her heart. Quilty even tops Humbert in perversions; where Humbert is content with a single nymphet, Quilty needs to film a whole gaggle of children fornicating in novel formations in order to get it up. He even manages to die a more pathetic death than Humbert.

  In many ways, Sellers seems to be playing himself, a sexually tormented chameleon uncomfortable in his own skin and happy only when adopting various masks. Just as there seems to have been no “real” Peter Sellers, Quilty is such a creature of the theater that he seems to exist only while pretending to be somebody else. When Humbert tries to get him to confess and atone for his sins at the end of the book—acting as a sublimely hypocritical priest/executioner—the best Quilty can muster is a bad vaudeville routine and a slapstick chase around his haunted mansion.

  Where Kubrick was cursed by being able to show too little, Adrien Lyne, in his well-intentioned but hopelessly misguided 1997 adaptation, is cursed by being able to show too much. Lyne lingers over the erotic aspects of the book to such an extent he misses everything else. But his film does have one huge advantage over Kubrick’s version in Dominique Swain’s transcendent Lo, the daughter of Melanie Griffith’s poignantly pathetic Charlotte Haze. Where Sue Lyon played Lo as a bleached-blond 25-year-old sexpot in the body of an adolescent, Swain plays her as a woman trapped in the purgatory between girlhood and adulthood. She’s the Lo of Nabokov’s novel, a reddish, coltish eternal ingenue with impossibly long limbs and a precocious seductiveness borrowed from teenybopper magazines and the popcorn movies she devours voraciously.

  She’s simultaneously brazenly sexual and disconcertingly girlish, as when she dances to an inane ditty with unself-conscious abandon. Swain’s fearless performance alone gives the film a transgressive sexual charge only hinted at in Kubrick’s version. It also made the film a prohibitively tricky proposition for American studios and a minor cause célèbre for a handful of prominent intellectuals—and also Erica Jong.

  A 1998 piece by Jong in the New York Observer maps out the case for Lyne’s Lolita in the shrillest, most hyperbolic terms imaginable, positing the film’s inability to find theatrical distribution as yet another sad case of a serious European artist (in this case, the man behind Flashdance and Indecent Proposal) trying to bring great art to the masses and being confronted at every turn by the monkey-like screeching of puritans convinced the film was a ringing endorsement of pedophilia. In Jong’s fevered imagination, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg should take to the streets to protest what she describes as the film’s “de facto censorship” at the hands of cowardly studios.

  Is there an element of truth in Jong’s rant? Perhaps. In addition to being residents of the greatest country ever (USA! USA! USA!), we Americans tend to be a little on the puritanical/hypocritical side where sex is concerned, especially when it comes to the young people. It’s entirely possible that Joe and Jane America would blanch at paying bloated ticket prices to see a sexy film about a pedophile in a theater where they could easily be spotted by their pastor, grandmother, third-grade teacher, and Bible group. It’s also likely that studios took a look at what Jong describes as a “$58 million art movie” and thought, to borrow the title of an early George Jones single, “There’s no money in this deal.” American studios would release sex fights between toddlers if they thought it would fatten their coffers.

  Lyne brandished his supposed fidelity to Nabokov’s novel as a sword of righteousness in his battles with would-be censors and critics. Yet he managed to preserve much of the book’s text while completely missing its spirit. This is evident from the very first image of Jeremy Irons’ Humbert Humbert swerving drunkenly in a giant old boat of a car en route to his showdown with Frank Langella’s Claire Quilty. Irons purrs narration from the book, caressing each word as he lingers fetishistically on his memories of Lo. Words that ooze irony in the novel are uttered with hushed, breathy romanticism. Apparently no one told Lyne that Lolita is a comedy.

  We then segue from this endgame to the ostensible cause of the protagonist’s erotic fixation on nymphets: his tragically unconsummated romance with a childhood sweetheart. Lyne films Humbert’s romanticized memories of his doomed romance as a cross between a half-remembered dream and an artsy perfume ad. It comes across not as the skeleton key that unlocks the most tortured secrets of its protagonist’s troubled psyche but as a pedophile’s self-mythology. It feels like a lie designed to trick readers into seeing the protagonist as a true romantic irrevocably scarred by the death of his first true love, instead of as a dangerous sex criminal.

  Over the course of Nabokov’s Lolita, Humbert’s unreliable narrator performs a delicate psychological striptease in which he reveals only what he wants the audience to know. Yet he still exposes himself as a misanthrope devoid of empathy and oblivious to anything but his sexual conquest of Lo. Watching Irons brood thoughtfully and gaze longingly throughout Lolita, I was struck with the notion that Lyne had made a Lolita Humbert Humbert would endorse, one that would vindicate him in the eyes of history. Lyne’s Lolita unleashes Humbert’s sexuality while castrating his wit and misanthropy.

  To cite a single example, Kubrick stages as brutal black comedy the scene where Mason’s Humbert reads a letter in which Charlotte professes her amour fou for her handsome lodger in the most histrionic manner imaginable and begs him to flee the house permanently while she’s gone unless he wants to be with her forever as man and wife. Humbert reads Charlotte’s maudlin sentiments—her wholesale misuse of basic French in a pathetic attempt to appear worldly is a particularly deft touch, n’est-ce pas—with withering sarcasm and undisguised contempt, laughing a dark, cruel laugh during especially earnest, overwrought parts. True, Nabokov never actually writes that Humbert laughed derisively as he read the letter. But how could he have responded any other way?

  Nabokov and Kubrick’s Humbert is a cracked actor who must adopt a series of socially acceptable poses—visiting educator, harmless lodger, loyal husband, single father—to keep the world from seeing his true self. In moments like these, that façade of normalcy and propriety cr
acks and we see Humbert as he truly is—a petty tyrant who snorts derisively while a dreadful but sincere woman nakedly pours out her heart.

  Now compare this to how Lyne stages the scene. In Lyne’s version, when Humbert reads the letter in Lo’s bed while cradling one of her teddy bears, it’s the voice of Griffith’s lovestruck Charlotte Haze we hear. Irons’ face reveals next to nothing: not contempt, not disdain, not revulsion at such a grotesque display of emotion, just a mischievous hint of delight when Charlotte asks him to become a father to her daughter. This is a subtler reading of the scene, but it’s also less powerful. A scene of cathartic black comedy becomes one of muted drama.

  Where Lyne skimps on black comedy, he goes overboard with sex. Lyne gives us a gauzy, soft-focus, softcore version of Nabokov; think of it as Lolita After Dark. Kubrick brought to Lolita his genius as an ironist. He molds the material in his image. Lyne does the same, transforming one of literature’s funniest, darkest comedies into an endless procession of pretty pictures set to Ennio Morricone’s swooning score.

  By making the film a period piece and lingering over period trappings, Lyne robs the book of its urgency and modernity. It becomes something that happened to dead people long ago. In the process, it loses much of its transgressive charge. Lyne does, however, do justice to the title character. Since Lolita is seen through Humbert’s eyes and he sees Lo as a sexual creature above all else, we almost lose sight of Lo’s remarkable resolve.

  There is a moment of enormous power in the Lyne version where Lo lets out an animal moan of despair upon learning that her mother is dead, and we realize just how deeply she’s been wounded. She’s lost her father, her brother (a detail Humbert sees fit to mention only in passing, as if it were no more consequential than the passing of a house cat), and now her mother, leaving her at the mercy of a sexual predator. But her spirit remains unbroken, and she retains a spark of life and a streak of mischievous wit. Lo is the book’s hero; her triumph is the resilience of the human spirit. She’s strong enough to go through hell yet still be able to give herself—if not her heart—to her husband, a good, decent, simple man who is the opposite of both Humbert and Quilty.

  Lyne’s Lolita comes close to redeeming itself with a heartbreaking scene where Humbert visits the now married and pregnant Lo, looking dowdy, plain, and millions of miles removed from the frolicsome nymphet of Humbert’s imagination. In this scene, the past takes on an almost physical presence as Humbert discovers that he really does love Lo, not just the glorious ghost that troubles his imagination. Lust has turned to love. But it’s too late.

  Like the Simpsons episode where Lisa rejects the romantic advances of Ralph Wiggum, if you freeze-frame either the Kubrick or Lyne Lolita, you can literally pinpoint the exact moment when Humbert’s heart breaks and the tiny little shred of hope he’s clung to zealously in the face of overwhelming blackness disintegrates. It’s when Lo gets a dreamy, faraway look in her eyes and gushes that Claire Quilty was the only man she really ever loved, that everyone else—her husband, Humbert—was just a poor substitute. It’s not that Lo was averse to giving her heart to a sexual deviant; it’s that Humbert was the wrong sexual deviant. After that, all that’s left for Humbert is murder, incarceration, and the sweet release of the grave, followed by an eternity of hellfire. But nothing Satan could hurl at Humby could wound him more profoundly than the ecstatic gleam in dear, tragic Lo’s eyes when she beams about her beloved Claire.

  Nabokov described Lolita as a product of his “love affair with the English language.” Lyne’s Lolita ironically includes more of Nabokov’s words than Kubrick’s but misses their meaning and context. He’s created a kinder, gentler Humbert Humbert. He’s cleaned up Humbert’s act while doing him the ultimate injustice: transforming a great literary monster into a lovelorn sap.

  Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco

  Chapter 6

  My Year Of Flops Jr.: “You Know, For Kids!”

  When Middle-Aged Puppet-Men Attack! Case File #78: Pinocchio

  Originally Posted October 23, 2007

  When Life Is Beautiful began to conquer the United States, it made writer, director, and star Roberto Benigni the most beloved Italian export since pizza. By the time Benigni’s nightmare reign of whimsy had reached an end, he was the most reviled Italian this side of Mussolini. He had devolved into a fascist of the heart whose message seemed to be, “Love me and my adorable antics, or I crush you like a bug. Oh no, I use up all my English making love-threat-promise to the moon!”

  Benigni’s meteoric rise and precipitous fall serve as cautionary warnings about the dangers about overstaying your welcome. The impish man-child had been a familiar face to arthouse denizens for decades, thanks to his uniformly awesome collaborations with Jim Jarmusch, and a huge star in his native Italy and Europe for much longer. Yet in spite of an ill-fated, American-made attempt at reviving the Pink Panther series with Benigni in the lead role in the early ’90s, the incorrigible Italian ham was largely an unknown quantity stateside until late in the decade.

  Life Is Beautiful changed all that. On paper, a heartwarming family comedy–drama set in a concentration camp must have looked like a recipe for disaster. When Jerry Lewis mined similar territory in 1972’s The Day The Clown Cried, the result was the most notorious unreleased movie in history. Yet when Benigni mugged his way through the bleakest corners of Nazi Germany, he became an international icon.

  Beautiful opened to mostly strong reviews and unprecedented box office en route to becoming one of the top-grossing foreign films of all time. Our country’s embrace of Benigni reached its apex when he won the Academy Award for Best Actor and Beautiful won Best Foreign Film. In an ecstatic frenzy, Benigni leaped on top of chairs rushing to the podium, where he expressed a desire to kidnap, then make love to everybody, and other assorted nonsense. The Oscar clip-reel moment simultaneously cemented Benigni’s place in American pop culture and hastened his decline.

  As a backlash quickly gained momentum, Benigni became less adorable by the second. Parodies of Benigni’s antics started popping up everywhere, from The Simpsons to Saturday Night Live. People began asking troubling questions. Was Benigni a modern-day Charlie Chaplin or a less-hirsute Robin Williams? Was Life Is Beautiful a timeless testament to the power of imagination and hope, or a crass vanity project? Had we as a culture been suckered? Was the emperor of middlebrow whimsy at least a tad bit underdressed?

  Benigni’s decision to follow Beautiful with a 2002 adaptation of Pinocchio with himself in the lead role answered all those questions. What sane 50-year-old casts himself as a little boy? Then again, what sane human being thinks, “You know what would be the perfect setting for a heartwarming family movie? A concentration camp!”? One of those bad ideas made Benigni’s stateside career. The other took it away.

  The casting of a clearly middle-aged man as a prepubescent scamp would be enough to sink most movies. But the American release of Pinocchio amplified that miscalculation by replacing Benigni’s instantly recognizable voice with that of journeyman American actor and voice-over specialist Breckin Meyer. In a bizarre bit of intergenerational ventriloquism, the voice of a 50-year-old Italian pretending to be a puppet boy was overdubbed by a twentysomething American.

  Pinocchio tries to explain away its never-ending parade of jarring incongruities with twinkling narration that ushers viewers gently into a land where “animals can speak, a child can look like a grown-up, and very often grown-ups can act like children.” The narrator neglects to mention that in this magical land of Fantastical Vanity Projects, the words people speak are often bitterly at odds with the movements of their lips.

  Pinocchio opens with an impish log being made into a puppet blessed with the gift of life. Breckini’s papa oozes pride as he puts the finishing touches on his wooden brainchild: sagging skin, wrinkles aplenty, and a rapidly receding hairline. It’s adorable that in this version, the kindly puppet maker chooses to make a puppet roughly his own age: He’s less a child surrogate
than a potential canasta partner. Breckini comes alive and prances about wearing more makeup than a two-dollar Parisian whore and a smock that looks like it was made out of any Jewish grandmother’s floral-print slipcovers.

  In spite of stern warnings from his cricket sidekick/conscience, Breckini quickly develops a taste for trouble. Instead of going to school, he heads to a puppet theater, where he’s nearly devoured by a sentimental giant, who ultimately takes pity on him and gives him five gold coins. The coins quickly find their way into the pockets of the Cat and the Fox, scoundrels who don black executioner hoods redolent of both Ku Klux Klan robes and the prisoner-abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. Then they string Breckini up on a tree branch and leave him to die in front of an impossibly huge and luminous moon. The Blue Fairy (played by Nicoletta Braschi, Benigni’s real-life wife, and voiced by Glenn Close) takes pity on the poor, misguided puppet and saves him from certain death.

  This establishes a pattern from which the film seldom deviates: Breckini must choose between doing right and doing wrong. He invariably chooses wrong, suffers disproportionately, and faces imminent destruction, only to be bailed out at the last minute by the Blue Fairy, the film’s trusty, oft-employed deus ex machina. Many of these grim elements are taken directly from Carlo Collodi’s original novel, but that doesn’t make them any less jarring.

  If the image of Breckini dangling from a tree isn’t enough to traumatize tykes, just a few minutes later, a group of rabbit pallbearers show up at his bedside with a coffin. The rabbit pallbearers are supremely peeved, and they slink away glumly when Breckini makes a miraculous recovery.