Review: Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens' tale of life on the hoof in pre-Victorian London has been carried off before in screen adaptations, but no director has ever made the story his own. Small wonder, though. It's hard to improve on Dickens' word-perfect vision of abandoned children being roped down into the great chimney mouth of the Industrial Revolution. Roman Polanski gives us a perfectly acceptable adaptation, but he is content to be yet another back-seat driver to Dickens. He never vivifies his Oliver Twist with the negative energy of his Warsaw nightmares, nor does he make a lasting visual statement. His cameras lack helium; they never rise up and give us a panoramic view of the teeming metropolis as it once was, more Bombay than Buckingham.

To twist, in Cockney parlance, is to hang. The title is properly read as 'Oliver Doomed' or 'Oliver Damned.' So it goes without saying that the child actor who bottles himself into the role should be gaunt, sallow, and capable of criminality. This Oliver, played by newcomer Barney Clark, seems more apt to be hawking toys and burgers between shows on the beeb. He reads the lines well, but he seems a little too well-fed and adoptable to play a starving orphan that nobody wants. It would have been a mistake to cast older, however. Polanski can be congratulated for not casting almost-twenty-somethings in the pivotal roles of the children.

Oliver's original sin is to ask for more gruel at the feet of the workhouse cook; in doing so he instantly constipates the bursting-at-the-seams beadle, and out he goes. Wedged out of his natural place in the system (orphans and criminals are used to pick oakum out of used rope), Oliver is soon pulled along with the current into greater London, where he meets up with the Artful Dodger, a tween-sized reprobate in a man-sized frock who fingers kerchiefs and pocket-watches from ladies and offers them a polite thump of his brim in return. 16-year old Harry Eden is also a little too well-fed for his part, but we can believe that maybe the Dodger would be well-fed, so the performance passes the test.

The center of gravity in the movie is, as you might guess, the Dodger's employer, the Jewish thief-maker Fagin. A turd-sandwich for generations of British Jews, this character is some kind of Mt. Everest of stereotypes; at best a hulking, ambulatory rat, and at worst, the saucer-eyed scion of Judas himself. Still, a great part for the actor who can manage it, and Ben Kingsley is no slouch. He can go ahead and start looking for a door that needs a stop or other suitable love-hate location for his Oscar. As Fagin, he projects straight through the mask of exaggerated features and gives us a sympathetic, compelling scoundrel. Kingsley sees salvation in the rogue's genuine, twisted feeling for his gallery of child thieves. This Fagin is little more than a child himself, except for his slimy old rictus and his capacity for protecting his own interest.

One scene that Polanski gets exactly right is Fagin's final scene, which comes at the very end of the film, in the form of a strange denouement. Oliver visits him in a prison infirmary, and finds that his mind has started to crumble. Kingsley is at his best here, responding to the boy's kindness while at the same time playing the part of a man who is wilting for being taken out of the nourishing soup of his criminal world. He's so much a fish out of water in the solitary jail cell, without his boys, that his mind can't commit to reality. It's a strange scene for contemporary audiences (why is Oliver thanking the man who nearly got him killed?) but Kingsley understands the point.

The real bad guy in the story, with the great bad guy name, is Bill Sykes, Fagin's henchman. Blinking his beady eyes like a drunken owl whenever his authority is challenged, he represents pure, robotic thuggery. It's he who continually thwarts Oliver's plans to exit Fagin's lair for a more respectable life, and it's also he who provides the film's penultimate climax - the brutal murder of the prostitute Nancy. Her crime is to peach on Bill and Fagin by letting Oliver's old benefactor know his current whereabouts. Polanski doesn't have the heart to serve up the book's graphic murder scene - death by both pistol and club. He keeps it short and sweet, which is understandable since his Nancy, played pitch-perfect by Leanne Rowe, is the most sympathetic character in the film.

Nancy's death is in many ways the fulcrum of the book, if not the movie. Dickens goes to great lengths to describe the river of blood that emanates from her body, covering Sykes and even his dog. As soon as the outside world learns what has happened, an angry mob materializes to demand the head of the murderer. What kind of odd society is this, that must fall upon a murderer instantly but never gives much thought to the extraordinary poverty going on every day? Polanski doesn't quite land his hooks into this theme and reel it to shore as he should, which is a shame.

Charles Dickens probably never imagined a day when children would be romanticized and envied their innocence by a population of fat, paedomorphic adults. He certainly didn't anticipate such a day in his writings. The Oliver of his book is cut loose and cast off from the busy adult world. He doesn't walk in time with a surround-sound orchestra or fight for the right of children to have rights. He's a mangy cur on the outer rim of a great event horizon that's vacuuming in people, industry, culture and every kind of injustice. If Roman Polanski had dug a little deeper and opened his camera lens a little wider, he might have unleashed more of the raw power of this story.