In any book-to-film adaption, there are certain elements that are flawlessly translated onto the big screen, and there are other elements that just aren’t visual enough to make an impact on viewers in the same way that they would as written words. Implications get overlooked, certain themes may lose their precedence, entire characters may actually change because of how different things must be onscreen. One such example of this dramatic shift is in Vladimir Nabokov’s extremely poetic novel Lolita. So much of Lolita relies on the power of narrator Humbert Humbert’s words, his elaborate and fantastical way of speaking, and his perspective on every single event that occurs throughout the story, whether or not we can rely on him as a narrator. In the film, not only do we have less of a narrator of the story as a whole, but there is very little to do with voiceover or even Humbert’s journal, and so Kubrick needed to rely on other elements to tell the story of Humbert and Dolores Haze (aka Lolita). So what can you do to tell a story that is mainly inside an unreliable character’s head when you’re using the medium of
film? For Kubrick, the answer was to enhance the body language of his actors and to enlarge the parts of characters besides Humbert. Admittedly, Kubrick went on record saying that if he had known how difficult a project Lolita would be to adapt, he may not have taken it, but it is an interesting case into how books and films differ, even with the same material and story being told.
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