Out last movie, Lolita, is my least favorite of Kubrick's films, but I'm pretty sure that's almost all my fault and not his. I think I could make some headway toward understanding it and its place in Kubrick's oeuvre, if I remind myself that he was pathologically drawn to the banal. In all of his films, when the subject is huge and we conventionally expect menace and mystery--nuclear doomsday, an alien artifact on the moon, premonitions of evil in a haunted hotel---we get instead an awkward phone conversation (Strangelove), a boring conference room talk from the boss (2001), and an excessively cordial job interview (The Shining). Clockwork Orange somehow manages to move its plot forward brilliantly even with what seems like half an hour of screen time taken up with prison paperwork.
Lolita is not, like these films, held together with a cement of banality, it is about banality itself. Or, since this is Kubrick, one might more accurately call it "existential banality." Humbert, as played by James Mason, desperately clings to the idea that he is in love with a perfect female form. The problem is, of course, that Lolita is not a perfect form, but a teenage girl who is perhaps not very bright. The moment when she last speaks to him, sipping a bottle of beer, pregnant with another man's child, is utterly ordinary but poignant in the way it forces the real beauty of Lolita's humanity upon Humbert's wasted and blinkered imagination. But before then, we have all the (for Humbert) tedious milestones of teenage life in middle class America combined with the utterly icky spectacle of an otherwise cultivated man not only under the (mistaken?) impression that he is in love with his stepdaughter, but that it's all somehow worthy of the elevated diction of his pretentious journal entries. Perhaps Lolita shows us that the banal becomes formally existential when we are either too cynical or too credulous about what happens to us. Humbert somehow manages to be both.
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