It’s as if instead of showing “Lolita” from Humbert Humbert’s p.o.v., little Dolores Haze had grown up and taken matters into her own hands.
Neither “Blackbird” nor “Una” are works about the horrors of pedophilia, any more than that was the main theme of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.”
Mendelsohn makes Ray plausibly remorseful, yet the suspicion remains that he’s as creepily self-serving as Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita .