My Year of Flops (32 page)

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 cracks 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.