The Talkies: Saving Private Lolita

...We are left to contemplate in all its awful splendor the image of the self-confessed pervert who stands for what have come to be called "traditional values" and who is repeatedly shocked by the revolutionary attitudes to sexual morality and modesty common in his adopted country...

...Here, coolness under fire looks more like a case of the actors' having been let in on the shared secret between author and audience that, no matter how bad it looks (tied hand and foot in a burning house...

...But what makes it special are the little Spielbergian touches which extend beyond the visible to the audible — the variation between deafening noise outside and its muted quality in underwater shots, for example...

...The American Spectator • September 1998 69...

...Not even a shell-shock case, which Miller sometimes seems close to being, goes to war to save lives (rather, because some things Steven Spielberg has yet to learn from Adrian Lyne...

...When you have invested close to $100 million in a hopeful "blockbuster," you tend to play it safe and with what has worked in the past...

...How could he make such a mistake...

...True, Jeremy Irons and Melanie Griffith are all wrong for the parts of Humbert Humbert and Charlotte Haze, Lolita's mother...

...T hat there is yet hope for Spielberg is suggested by the case of Adrian Lyne, director of slick, mediocre movies like Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal, who has finally come into his own with this month's Movie of the Month, a new version of Lolita...

...Mention should also be made of a terrific job done by the veteran Frank Langella as the pornographer and Humbert's alter ego, Clare Quilty...

...Yet there are machines and machines, and, compared to the assembly-line robots who must have made Lethal Weapon 4, the no less machine-like Steven Spielberg is "Deep Blue," the computer that beat the world chess champion...

...This was so unpopular with the Hollywood studios (always a good sign) that it almost wentstraight to a first American run on Show-time, the cable network...

...When the unbeatable movie-making machine has to think, it starts to whirr and pop and smoke until finally it shuts down altogether...

...68 September 1998 • The American Spectator are more precious than life), and it is a catastrophic misstep for Spielberg to put such words in his hero's mouth—a failure of imagination as total as the successes he has enjoyed in so many of the movie's details...

...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS web site—http://www.spectator.org...

...Those are given...

...Only at the last minute was it picked up for release by Samuel L. Goldwyn—a small company which is unlikely to be in a position to give this wonderfully unsparing adumbration of the sexualization of childhood the sendoff it deserves...

...By far the most impressive comes with his portrayal in the film's opening passage of the landing at Omaha Beach...

...Because, I think, accounting for his characters' actions is for him just another trick of the trade...

...More variation in sound comes with scenes purporting to represent the numbness inside the head of Miller—also a kind of failed escape —where the immediacy of battle and the imminence of sudden and violent death suddenly both seem a long way away...

...Of course there is lots of blood and body parts being blown off before our eyes, the quick-cutting confusion of battle and the fear on the faces of the men...

...I hope Lolita will make some of them think of that as they sit with glassy eyes and vacant minds, watching all those simulated bombs going off for their delectation this summer..} James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...

...Without a plausible dramatic context, what else is there to look to...

...His latest directorial effort, Saving Private Ryan, deals with a rescue mission aimed at finding and retrieving an American paratrooper in the invasion of Normandy who is now the sole survivor of four brothers, and it is as usual a brilliant demonstration of movie-maker's art...

...I wonder what he'll do next...

...Even The Mask of Zorro, set in an era of sword-play and acrobatic derring-do when all they had to work with was gunpowder, offers us a climactic explosion to rival the apocalyptic variety on offer from its putatively more up-to-date competitors...

...For a moment we are presented with the possibility of sanctuary from the murderous machine-gun fire on the beach—only to see it snatched away again in a moment as men are being shot and blood spurting from them even under water...

...With each touch of the Spielbergian magic we are invited to turn away, post-modern fashion, from the artifice to the artificer, from the impressively brave soldiers to the impressively clever film-maker making them jump and dance for us...

...The mechanical inexorability of our relentlessly playful heroes' escapes is betokened by the rather horrible humor they are constantly indulging in at each other's expense...

...It has probably never even occurred to him that it is an interesting question, philosophically...

...And there is scarcely a scene in the entire two hours and forty minutes that does not yield such riches—to the point where one becomes vaguely aware of and annoyed by the effortless mastery of cinematic illusionism...

...nothing really bad is going to happen to them...

...He just needs to fill a space and retrieves a bit of superficially plausible dialogue from his capacious, fully-searchable database of movie-making methods and techniques to fill it...

...He himself has no views one way or the other on why men go to war...

...Nabokov's ironies are if anything sharpened by the trimming given to the more literary aspects of his masterpiece...

...Which is not to say that most of these techniques do not work impressively well...

...Army shooting at him) and one of the meteor-showers in Armageddon as having taken off the distinctive top of the Chrysler Building in New York, though as no one else has remarked on the fact perhaps it didn't happen...

...At the level of the individual shot, indeed, it is just about perfect...

...So much for having defeated Hitler's dream of world conquest...

...The mystery about Spielberg, and perhaps the reason why he seems so machine-like, lies in the answer to the question of why he goes on making movies — since, apart from the fact that he is programmed to do so, there seems no point to any of them...

...But the movie more than makes up for these mistakes in casting with a terrific script by Stephen Schiff, which simplifies and focuses the diffuse brilliance of Nabokov's novel and so does what a good screenplay ought to do, and an absolutely stunning performance as Lolita herself by the 14-year-old Dominique Swain...

...Even the products of our dumbed-down schools must suppose that the World War was actually for something, even before the brass decided that Ryan (Matt Damon) should be sent home to his mama...

...no problem...

...This too is obvious nonsense...

...And out of the midst of this same explosion, completely unscathed, come striding the heroes who have dared the fire in order to do right—just as their counterparts did a few months ago after being shot at close range with a volley of musket-fire in The Man in the Iron Mask...

...The fortunes of the film industry depend on selling sex (and, of course, "violence") to young teens...

...That, after all, is part of the formula of the blockbuster, which always looks as if it has been put together by machines...

...One is aware, as one would hardly be if one were actually there, of the constant jingle of the brass bullet casings ejected by machine guns, and, paradoxically, the sound makes us feel as if we are there.44 Also as usual with Spielberg, alas, the film considered as a dramatic whole is utter nonsense...

...E-mail him at JVBowman@compuserve.com...

...This year, I seem to remember both Godzilla (or rather the U.S...

...It is the fish which make this a truly Spielbergian moment...

...Oh yes, we think during a shot in which rain falling on leaves is mixed up with and finally gives way to the patter of rifle fire, here is yet another excellent bit of movie-making...

...Can it be justified to take away some of the vital troops necessary to the larger purpose of winning the war for the sake of a bereaved mother in Iowa...

...Thus we must withhold from this film the accolades that would be accorded to better dramatists who are lesser filmic technicians...

...For a moment the body irrelevantly refuses to respond to such overwhelming stimuli, and we switch back and forth between Miller's point of view and that of the omniscient and indifferent god of battle who accepts all these sacrifices without a twinge of human sympathy...

...Also as usual for Spielberg, alas, the film considered as a dramatic whole is utter nonsense...

...Hence there is a certain sameness about the kid-pleasers whose release is timed to coincide with that season of the year when children have even less to do than they do when they're in school...

...No wonder Hollywood didn't like it...

...Lethal Weapon 4, for example, the latest installment of the franchise series, drags Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Murtagh (Danny Glover) from one life-threatening encounter to the next with scarcely a moment for them to deliver their wisecracks in between, yet its plot doesn't even try to make itself comprehensible...

...7 As the fierce struggle for the beachhead dies down, the camera pulls back to show us one of the three dead Ryans lying a little away from the heaps of bodies we have been looking at hitherto, face down in the sand—and in the midst of some half a dozen dead fish...

...At any rate, the Air Force in the latter picture was just as full of corrupt and time-serving incompetents as the Army in the former, and that's the main thing...

...Or the main thing next to the explosions...

...So long as they get their bang, the moronic children of all ages who persist in rewarding the stuJAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement dios for their merely pyrotechnical enthusiasms never seem to protest at even the most outrageous of absurdities of this kind...

...Instead he has his hero and the leader of the rescue mission, Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks), talking about having to square his conscience by reckoning that, for each man under him who is killed, ten, or twenty, or thirty others will be saved...

...To be sure, there are serious moral and philosophical problems raised by the mission...

...The nearest he comes to identifying the rationale of Saving Private Ryan comes when the gruff, no-nonsense Sergeant Horvath (Tom Sizemore) says that, in later years when they look back on their part in the war, they will think that "Maybe saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we managed to pull out of this whole godawful mess...

...Of course, the fact that we are thinking of it as movie-making makes the trick somewhat counterproductive...

...But what sticks in the mind is the almost too-painful sight of Miss Swain as the "daisy-fresh girl" corrupted—as, surely, Nabokov must have imagined —not by some loathsome middle-aged pervert but by her own embrace of the logic of "teenage" existence as romantic, Rousseauiste America invented it in the immediate postwar expansion...

...But Spielberg pretty much ignores such questions after the scene in which General Marshall (Harve Presnell) rules in favor of the rescue with Lincolnian schmaltz...