Sorry, but this film just can't hold a candle to the novel. (Of course, with the exception of 'Lawrence of Arabia' and its source, 'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom', I can't think of one movie based on a novel that can.) I won't dwell on its more obvious flaws, but will mention them in passing: Jeremy Irons is too old for his role; Dominique Swain is a convincing 14-year-old but not a pregnant 17-year-old; the character of Clare Quilty, a figure of black humor both in the book and in Kubrick's version, is rendered by this script as a sinister, charmless pimp. The role which has taken the most heat on this site, and which I believe is the most impressive, is the role of Lolita's mother, acted by Melanie Griffith. I've read several comments that state that this character was intended to be fat and unattractive. What these viewers may have forgotten (or perhaps they have never read the book) is that every character in the story is seen through the eyes of one person: Humbert Humbert. Therefore Lolita is described as being an enticing, irresistible nymphet, although most people who actually came into contact with her would find her to be a rather unattractive, slatternly little brat; and her mother Charlotte is described as being a 'fat cow', when the fact probably was, was that she was a normal, healthy woman who had those secondary sexual characteristics (hips, thighs, breasts) that Humbert wasn't too crazy about and which he recoiled away from as 'fat'. Nabokov deliberately romanticized Humbert's predilection for girl-children by portraying him as a man haunted by a lost childhood love (rather like Charlie Chaplin); if he hadn't done this, the reader (and viewer) could have interpreted this aversion to grown women as more of a latent homosexuality than to pedophilia. That digression aside: the movie is gorgeously photographed and beautifully scored, and the ending is as likely to bring tears as the ending of the novel. Superior in many ways to the Kubrick version--I preferred Peter Sellers' Quilty in that film, but hated the way he kept intruding so obviously throughout the movie--and inferior in others.
