The Jewish Chronicle

Review: Lolita

Can Brian Cox summon the required refined sensuality for Nabokov’s most erudite hero?

September 10, 2009 09:59
Brian Cox as Nabokov’s unrepentant paedophile
1 min read

It was a question of whether Brian Cox, whose muscular face does macho better than most, could summon the required refined sensuality for Nabokov’s most erudite hero, Humbert Humbert. That is, if “hero” is not a misnomer for a self-confessed pervert whose every thought and action revolves around having his very wicked way with an underage girl.

Nabokov described Humbert as “a vain and cruel wretch”. And so he is. But he is only eventually revealed as such. For much, if not most of the novel — paired down here by director Richard Nelson into an uninterrupted monologue of 115 minutes — he is a man who possesses the witty charm that only comes with self-deprecation.

Sitting on his bed, dressed in grey prison pyjamas, the solitary but not necessarily lonely H H is delivering a memoir, not a confession. Cox switches between the fevered and the sardonic, precisely capturing an absence of shame. Inevitably though, it is the writing that dazzles. Beautiful, perfect sentences that hang in the air. Humbert’s description of an earlier forbidden love ends with brutal simplicity. “And four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.” Don’t be afraid to laugh.