Up until the final scene, I was actually more engaged with this screenplay than I had been with the novel. This was for the same reason that the novelic screenplay is normally criticized: so much is left out. While the novel is sunk deep in the folds of Humbert Humbert's mind, the screenplay has to stop short. The film requires detachment. And in the white space left by this detachment, you begin to see, for the first time, the ostensible subject of the book and the movie: Lolita. Dolly. She has the real psychological drama: a kid wrestling for her own sexual identity in an impossible culture -- a culture with extremely strict purity-rules for girls coupled with economic and social conditions that place them so fully in the control of rapists like Humbert Humbert. Her cynicism and resentment and eventual escape are profoundly moral gestures -- and they look awfully like the kind of nasty teenage rebellion we try to drum out of little girls in favor of feminine pliability.

But once I caught a whiff of this, I only became frustrated that Nabokov continually neglected this story line, this psychology, in favor of whatever little soul-quibbles his pedophile might be burping up. And finally, once Humby couldn't damage Dolly anymore, old Vlad just did away with her. Keep her young and nymphic for life -- her final tragedy to have her flattened self immortalized in the prose of her adoring misogynist rapist.