Why critic Pauline Kael didn’t hate Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Lolita’: “The surprise is how enjoyable it is”
Between 1968 and 1991, Pauline Kael wrote reviews for the New Yorker and was one of the most respected and feared critics in show business. Like Roger Ebert, she was known for being a witty and entertaining writer. Unlike him, she had a tendency towards unpredictability and often voiced her negative opinions with prose so scathing that it scarred filmmakers for life.
Her review of 1982’s Blade Runner, for example, featured her typical razor-sharp acidity. She called it “a suspenseless thriller,” and dismissed its noirish world-building as convoluted, unexplained, and even amateurish. Ridley Scott was so hurt by the review that he brings it up in almost every interview to this day, even though Kael has been dead for more than two decades. He also claims to keep a framed copy of it in his office.
Of all the unpopular opinions that Kael espoused over the years, however, none was as aberrant as her utter loathing for just about everything Stanley Kubrick made. She dismissed A Clockwork Orange as cold, senseless, and pornographic, shrugged off Dr Strangelove as a hollow cautionary tale that failed to make a broader point, and provided one of her most cutting assessments of The Shining. Echoing a phrase that Jack Nicholson’s character types again and again in the film, she wrote, “[A]ll work and no play makes Stanley a dull boy, too.”
However, her greatest ire was reserved for Kubrick’s most transcendent work, the film that is often named as the greatest ever made – 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kael called it “monumentally unimaginative” and “probably the most gloriously redundant plot of all time.” It’s easy to criticise the film for being overly esoteric and long, but “unimaginative” and “redundant” are difficult to comprehend.
So, Kael was a Kubrick sceptic. She thought he lacked depth, originality, and feeling, and was extremely overrated. There was, however, one film of his that she actually didn’t despise – 1962’s Lolita. Based on Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel, the film is a dark satire about a man who becomes infatuated with a teenage girl. In the book, Lolita is 12 years old, but Kubrick and Nabokov, who also wrote the screenplay, decided that the only way they could get away with the film was to make her appear beyond the age of consent.
Kael was mildly impressed with the director’s work. “The surprise of Lolita is how enjoyable it is,” she wrote, unable to resist the temptation of a backhanded compliment. What she said next, however, was nothing short of a rave, “[I]t’s the first new American comedy since those great days in the 1940’s when Preston Sturges recreated comedy with verbal slapstick.” Sturges, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest comedic directors of all time, is a glowing comparison. She then went even further by asserting that it was “a more exciting comedy” than Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, which is often listed as one of the greatest films ever made.
Kael acknowledged that Lolita had structural weaknesses and fell apart at a certain point, but said that the script was so witty and the performances so expertly crafted that it hardly mattered. “Lolita isn’t a good movie,” she wrote, “[B]ut that’s almost beside the point.” It was, she explained, a fresh idea told in a refreshingly surrealist, comedic manner. As far as her Kubrick reviews go, she may as well have called it the greatest film of the century.
