Lolita

An epically misbegotten, misguided adaptation, Lolita details the illicit relationship that forms between a middle-aged college professor (James Mason’s Humbert Humbert) and a fourteen-year-old nymphet (Sue Lyon’s Lolita). Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick admittedly gets Lolita off to an strong start, as the film kicks off with an engrossing in-media-res opening detailing a confrontation between Humbert and Peter Sellers’ Clare Quilty – with the movie subsequently (and effectively) establishing the growing bond between Mason and Lyon’s respective characters. (It doesn’t hurt, either, that Kubrick peppers the proceedings with typically striking instances of bravura camerawork.) But Kubrick, working from a script by Vladimir Nabokov, squanders the promising setup by suffusing the movie’s midsection with a series of rambling and downright pointless interludes, with this particularly true of virtually everything involving Sellers’ aggressively off-the-wall character (ie there are too many scenes, including one in which Quilty pretends to be a cop, that meander to an infuriating extent). It is, as a result, not surprising to note that Lolita essentially crawls from one barely-connected set piece to the next, with the movie’s few positive attributes (eg Mason’s stirring performance) ultimately lost beneath a crush of hopelessly irrelevant elements. The movie’s massively overlong running time only exacerbates its often interminable atmosphere, and it’s finally impossible not to wonder just what Kubrick originally set out to accomplish with this mess.

* out of ****