Oliver Twist
Does the world honestly need another movie version of "Oliver Twist"? After David Lean's superbly atmospheric 1948 adaptation of the Dickens classic and the glossy, Oscar-winning 1968 musical "Oliver!," arguably not.
On the other hand, the world could assuredly use another Roman Polanski movie. Regardless of what you think of the man himself, 2002's "The Pianist" was a welcome reminder of the director's filmmaking gifts and of his ability to probe levels of human darkness few of us dare contemplate. Polanski, in fact, might be the ideal person to give us Dickens with the gloves off. As a child who saw the worst of World War II, he knows something about how civilized societies might eat their poorest and youngest constituents alive.
Polanski's "Oliver Twist" does acknowledge the brute horrors of late-Georgian England, at least for the first hour or so. Then it gets seduced by Dickens -- by the author's flair for outsize characters and densely packed melodrama. The result is an expertly made, very watchable film that's curiously lacking in impact. By Polanski standards that has to be a disappointment.
Dickens's intent was to write an expose of lower-class living conditions, especially among the young, disguised as a ripping yarn. Since movies favor the latter, a film "Oliver Twist" rises or falls on its characters: Fagin, Bill Sikes, Nancy, the Artful Dodger. Oliver is largely passive -- his woes and his kindness are all that make him stand out from the pack -- so the best a director can do is cast someone who won't knock over the furniture. The young British actor Barney Clark fills the bill suitably and no more. Say what you like about the musical version, it had in Mark Lester an Oliver to tear your heart.
Polanski's heart goes out, instead, to all the boys in the workhouse, and he discreetly slams home the hypocrisy of any Christian nation that would enslave its children. After the famous "Please, sir, I want more" confrontation, Oliver is hired out as apprentice to a mortician, and there he shows some spine, finally fleeing the 70 miles to London.
The first scenes in the city get your hopes up. Polanski stages them as an endlessly chaotic street fight, with the muddy squalor of "Gangs of New York." The Artful Dodger (Harry Eden) turns up, as quick and as confident as he should be, and leads Oliver to Fagin, who is played by Ben Kingsley with one eye on anti-Semitic controversies of the past and the other eye on Alec Guinness' troubling, brilliant performance in the Lean film. Kingsley softens the edges of caricature and gives the part a likable immediacy, but whether a gentle Fagin is of any use to Dickens or to us is left hanging.
Polanski and his "Pianist" screenwriter Ronald Harwood have smartly excised the revelations about Oliver's parentage that cut 19th-century readers slack. Somewhere along the way, though, "Oliver Twist" loses the propulsive forward momentum Dickens gave everything he wrote. Leanne Rowe as the sympathetic tart Nancy and Jamie Foreman as the nasty Bill Sykes (the character's surname is spelled differently in this film version than in the book) are fine and life-size, and there's a problem -- they need to be bigger than life, with the hard outlines of a newspaper etching to them. (Edward Hardwicke as Mr. Brownlow, on the other hand, is a proper cartoon of middle-class kindheartedness.)
It's as though Polanski had set the story's foolproof motor on cruise control and left the room; the tale is well told but told without personality. At the very end, though, he gives us a twist from Dickens that few "Oliver" movies have bothered with: the final scene in which Fagin, jailed and bound for the scaffold, is comforted by the young hero while the grown-ups stand by in perplexity. "Oh, God, forgive this wretched man," cries the boy, and suddenly, for a brief moment, the film is about something.
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