Lolita 1962
I have heard about Lolita for a long time, but never had a chance to watch it. It was available via a Screen Pass and I was glad to pick it out. I didn’t know much about the movie except that it stars James Mason as a middle aged professor infatuated with a young girl. Lolita is 12 years old in Nabokov’s original book (which I have never read), but actress Sue Lyon plays her closer to her own age of 15 or so. It is also one of Stanley Kubrick’s early movies. Kubrick is kind of a mixed bag for me, with some great movies and some lesser ones. Lolita seems like it was filmed before he had any idea of what he was doing. It feels very clunky and the characters are really poorly drawn, just doing things as required by the plot rather than with any consistency of character. It starts out interesting and darkly funny as James Mason is instantly smitten with this girl and she plays around with his affections while her mother and some other women are coming on to him. I didn’t realize Peter Sellers was in the movie and while he is a critical character, he is barely developed and given way too much freedom to improvise his part. The sexual stuff is kind of frank with Shelley Winters (the mother) coming on to James Mason (almost cartoonishly) and a swinging married couple propositioning him, but they understandably had to leave the child sex stuff pretty vague, thank goodness. So it isn’t quite as icky as it could have been, but it also doesn’t have much reason to exist either. Mason is so buttoned down he can’t really go as crazy as he seems required to do plus you don’t really know what drives him. It seems weird he would have a murderous vendetta against someone he doesn’t really know, when Mason’s character was the one that obviously made most of the mistakes. The plot and characters are a mess and the movie is far more boring and much longer than it should be. I have to put most of that on Kurbrick for firstly thinking he could get a movie about child sex made, and secondly having enough creative control to make all of the mistakes that undermine what he was allowed to tell. The movie endures because of its taboo subject matter and because Kubrick went on to make some really big movies (Dr. Strangelove was his next project), but for me Lolita is a real disappointment.
Written: 05 Sep 2021