One Paragraph Movie Review: Lolita

Three hundred and thirty-first film: Lolita, Kubrick’s 1961 version of Nabokov’s book about a paedophile, the young girl he grooms, her mother, and his rival — Peter Sellers playing another paedophile. I get that the book was shocking when it came out, and the film is, I guess, also shocking but for potentially different reasons. For one, it’s a Kubrick/Sellers/James Mason mix that drives jarringly between deep, icky, and comedic. For another, it’s surprising just how lame and pathetic it is to try to hinge a poetry professor’s dramatic journey on his inability to stop obsessing over a young girl who, in the story, is given virtually no personality except for the ability to manipulate and tease. It’s the girl’s fault, you see. Lolita, by virtue of not being derisively middle-aged like her mother, is responsible for the ruination of those who lecherously fixate on her. And of Sellers, I’d comment that just because a man is capable of doing lots of silly voices, it doesn’t always mean that he should. Pretty dumb. One and a half limp noodles out of five.