The “clumsily structure” 1962 classic that Pauline Kael couldn’t make up her mind on
Pauline Kael never held back on sharing incredibly brutal opinions on movies, even if it meant gravely offending the director in the process. She couldn’t care less, though; she just wanted to share her honest thoughts with readers, and not without her unmistakable wit.
One of the directors who felt her wrath more times than you’d expect was Stanley Kubrick. He’s widely regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers to have ever worked in Hollywood, equally excelling at satirical comedies as much as sci-fi epics and anti-war dramas.
The director preferred to adapt pre-existing works of fiction, giving them his distinctively Kubrickian treatment, which emphasised a strong visual palette, but you can hardly say that Kubrick was all style and no substance, because you can find rich layers of philosophical discussions within all of his work; just look at 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But Kael just thought the hugely influential sci-fi movie possessed a “gloriously redundant plot”. Nevertheless, you have to admire her boldness when it came to penning reviews of movies that many other critics heralded as masterpieces. She was much harder to convince, but out of all of Kubrick’s films, she had a surprising soft spot for Lolita, although she still didn’t think it was a good movie and, in fact, called it “clumsily structured”.
Kubrick teamed up with Vladimir Nabokov to adapt his novel for the big screen, which many people deemed impossible. ‘How did they ever make a movie out of Lolita?’ was the constant chant that surrounded Kubrick’s 1962 film, which defied the odds. This was a highly controversial tale of a middle-aged man’s sexual obsession with a 12-year-old, and the copious crimes he commits while trying to be with her. It’s a sickening story, but one that Nabokov handles so carefully, using dry humour to capture the absurdity of Humbert Humbert’s perversity.
So, how could Kubrick bring this story of abuse and paedophilia to the big screen while retaining the humour that defines the book through Humbert’s unreliable narration? Sue Lyon was cast as the titular character when she was just 14 years old, and the movie kept intimate scenes to a minimum, such that we don’t see her and Humbert (played by James Mason) kiss at all; thank God!
As a result, the movie isn’t totally faithful to the book, as allowances had to be made. Kael wasn’t of the belief that this was a masterpiece by any means, but she thought it worked well as a comedy. “For all its slackness of pace and clumsy editing,” she called it “a more exciting comedy than the last American comedy, Some Like it Hot”.
Kael added, “There is a paradox involved in the film Lolita. Stanley Kubrick shows talents in new areas (theme and dialogue and comedy), and is at his worst at what he’s famous for”. The critic’s opinion is admittedly bizarre because, despite considering it to be a bad movie, she enjoyed it nonetheless.
“Lolita isn’t a good movie, but that’s almost beside the point,” she said, “Lolita is so clumsily structured that you begin to wonder what was shot and then cut out, why other pieces were left in, and whether the beginning was intended to be the end; and it is edited in so dilatory a fashion that after the first hour almost every scene seems to go on too long. It’s as if Kubrick lost his nerve.”
Sometimes, that’s just the experience of watching a movie, though. You can see its flaws, but you can still like it, and Kael was brave enough to admit to that, in great detail.
