How does the director of such psychosexual dramas as Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal handle an adaptation of one of the most controversial literary works of the twentieth century? Largely as one would expect: the sex scenes are like dabs of paint on a canvas--never does Adrian Lyne pull back to reveal the whole piece; shafts of Rembrandt light beam through every window, sometimes lending the characters an ethereal glow, at other times ambiguously silhouetting them; the leading male is made a victim, despite his pedophilic and homicidal tendencies; and so on and so forth. Lolita is not a seamless film (I should add here that it also lacks sensationalism), but it does make more dramatic sense than Stanley Kubrick's 1962 interpretation, with believable, naked performances at its core.

Jeremy Irons stars as writer Humbert Humbert, a British expatriate who decides to rent a room at the house of Southern belle Charlotte Haze (Melanie Griffith) only after spotting her fourteen-year-old daughter Lolita (Dominique Swain) in the garden. (In this scene, Lolita is staring dreamily at pictures of Burt Lancaster.) Humbert's infatuation with the younger Haze results in his marriage to Charlotte: he wants to keep tabs on Lolita. He can barely stand his new wife, a chubby, aggressive woman who's on a maturity level with her daughter, and frequently attempts to drug her to sleep so she won't want to make love.

The unhappy nuptials are cut short by Charlotte's untimely death in a car accident; Humbert takes it upon himself to pull Lolita out of boarding school and so begins their road trip to spiritual and emotional hell. This version of Lolita has been touted as more faithful to Nabokov's book (ironically, Nabokov wrote the script for Kubrick's adaptation): reinserted is a key passage, detailing Humbert's own sexual awakening at 14 with a steady girlfriend. Just months into that relationship, his young lover passed away. "The poison was in the wound," goes the narration (delivered in Irons' tranquil growl), "and the wound wouldn't heal." The filmmakers thus imply that Humbert's passion for nymphets would subside if he were to see his affair with Lolita into her adulthood.

Swain's portrayal is probably the best thing about Lyne's Lolita. She doesn't play her as an angelic schoolgirl fantasy figure--our feelings about Lolita ride a rickety rollercoaster on a scene-by-scene basis. She seizes all opportunities to physically, mentally, and emotionally screw Humbert, but Swain never comes off as some thoughtful manipulator. Indeed her compulsive behaviour is very much that of a teenage girl, a mercurial blossom. In its own convoluted way, Lyne's remake is a 137-minute anti-pedophilia rant: he shows the potent allure of sexual "wrongness" to demonstrate that only a masochist would fall into Humbert's predicament. This is a film of, if not import, complexity.

(Aside: the almost-unbearable Griffith--imagine Jennifer Tilly as June Cleaver--mercifully exits the picture shortly after her entrance. But not soon enough. On the bright side, both Howard Atherton's cinematography and Ennio Morricone's score beautifully evoke the 1940s.) 

For better or worse, Lyne has, in collaboration with screenwriter Stephen Schiff, flattened some of the satirical aspects of Lolita. (I say better for in Kubrick's version, we don't care about anyone--it's two hours of poking fun and pointing fingers at man-child Humbert, played by a prissy, parternal James Mason.) He wisely leaves the tale in its postwar setting: the aimlessness of our protagonist's plight is a national mood. If only Lyne had shown more conceptual and stylistic restraint, as so much of Lolita is blunt and obvious. A dream sequence full of elasticated images is too literal (it also plays like an outtake from Lyne's Jacob's Ladder), and the climax is a dissolve-packed mess so cinematically at odds with what precedes it that it's an example of bad film grammar. Lolita isn't as poignant as it yearns to be, despite Irons' rewarding efforts playing Humbert as a warm, regretful schnook and Swain's unfathomably accomplished debut. Humbert and Lolita's mutual desperation is absorbing to watch, though I'm not sure if those epilogue captions, final turns of the screw for both characters, were at all necessary.

My first copy of Lyne's Lolita was taped off Showtime cable. Even making allowances for VHS versus DVD and TV signals versus home video, Trimark's new disc is leaps and bounds better-looking and, especially, sounding, than that ½" dub. Presented in 1.85:1, 16x9-enhanced widescreen (the latter characteristic unidentified on the packaging), the image is smooth and film-like, betrayed only by minor banding artifacts during fades. Colour appears muted at times on purpose--in fact, they seem to desaturate as the film progresses, perhaps to reflect Humbert's dwindling state of mind. There is a general absence of pitch black, but such is the case for the majority of Lyne's work.

The 5.1 Dolby Digital audio really surprises. I skipped Lolita during its brief, post-Showtime theatrical run, so this was my first chance to hear its digital mix. Early in the film, Humbert's train makes a noisy stop, and it's as though a locomotive is barrelling through your living room. Left to right panning effects are abundant, and there is a precise split between the rears. The .1 channel has little to do except during the train sequence and a thunderstorm, but one wouldn't call it neglected. This dynamic track highlights the serene beauty of Morricone's music, his best since The Untouchables and maybe the most melancholy of his composing career.

This is the first Trimark DVD to properly compete with the big boys (New Line, Columbia) in terms of supplementary material. Some of its extras aren't even listed on the back cover! Worst things first: Adrian Lyne's commentary is rich while he's speaking, but he takes long breathers between observations, and these pauses are likely to put viewers to sleep, even with the production sound still present in the background. He's more engaging in the "On the Set" special, a 12-minute montage of atypically deep interviews with the director and his cast. Another great feature is the script excerpt with "jump to scene" access, although if Trimark includes it on future titles, they should magnify the typeface. Without your nose to the set, the screenplay's print is practically illegible.

The coolest addition to this Special Edition is Dominique Swain's screen test; she reads two scenes with Jeremy Irons and it's clear by segment's end why they hired her. (It's also apparent that Lolita went through some draft revisions between auditions and the shoot.) Really, I can't say enough good things about Swain--had the picture not debuted on TV, she'd have been eligible for an Oscar nomination, and deserved one. Rounding out the terrific package are cast and crew bios and a trailer, plus over a half-an-hour of deleted sequences (these are not just tail-ends of scenes that made the final cut) that provide a fascinating glimpse into the Lolita that never was, a version in which Humbert would have been less sympathetic. (His ejaculation during a chat with Lolita was, I feel, smartly excised from the first act, as was his daydream about drowning her mother.) If you haven't seen Lolita, don't fear the taboo subject matter: the film's most powerful and disturbing moments take place outside the bedroom. -Bill Chambers