I found that the two movie adaptations gave me a greater understanding of the novel, because of what they both could and could not achieve through a work that is so perfectly suited to its medium that it can’t provide a truly accurate transposition into another. Thus, I’m able to see the book with more clarity having it broken down through two wildly divergent paths.
Kubrick’s version seemed to mostly focus on the book’s fiddling with an ambiguous narrative stance, something that Nabokov always liked to play around with. He shifted the insanity of Humbert as a narrator onto the entire world at large where Clare Quilty serves as its capricious, chastising avatar dooming their horrible “relationship” as a matter of fate. If you watch the movie closely, Quilty appears throughout it (before the characters meet him in fact) even when he shouldn’t be able to, as a nigh supernatural figure. The entire world is essentially an encounter within Humbert’s dark mind that he and Dolores travel through as a warped road trip, with Quilty/the world cackling at them the whole way. That letter Humbert writes to Quilty accusing him of stealing away Dolores’s childhood is actually Humbert’s guilty conscience bleeding through, since he’s essentially writing it to himself, even though his conscious mind would never allow him to recognize that.
Lyne’s version dropped all of that narrative ambiguity and focused solely on the story and characterization in order to try and capture the book’s somewhat haunting, elegiac quality—that comes through even knowing how despicable Humbert really is. It captures a bit of that bifocal tension the novel creates through the effect of filtering a disturbing story through achingly—impossibly—beautiful language. Both these versions taken together actually give a pretty good approximation of the book, and certainly helped me to more clearly see what the novel achieved in its totality, although again, they together couldn’t quite equal a work that succeeded so well precisely because of how well it utilized the particular, innate strengths of its medium.
Didn’t Nabokov hate it as well? He actually fulfills a lot of that criteria, can actually appreciate the multi-lingual puns with an added poetic resonance, and I believe was already a fan of Joyce’s other works, but still abhored it.