Review

Review Date: 9-October-05
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

Oliver Twist (2005)

When I read that Roman Polanski was making a new version of Oliver Twist, my first reaction was Why? After all, it's been done several times before, and it would be hard to top the Oscar-winning 1968 musical. Adaptations of Victorian classics don't draw big crowds these days, judging by the recent flops of "Vanity Fair" and "Nicholas Nickleby;" and, as the latter film illustrates, Dickens has too many players and subplots to migrate to the big screen intact. Above all — and this comes from one of the author's biggest fans — Oliver Twist isn't that good to begin with. It's patchy and only occasionally inspired, and has an oppressive darkness at its core. How, I wondered, would Polanski market his film, and what changes could he make to recommend it?

As it turns out, Polanski didn't find a good answer to either question: his "Oliver Twist" is leaving theaters after a mere fortnight and evinces the same combination of highs and lows as the original. Through the trials of Oliver (Barney Clark, a high), he tries to depict a ray of hope that persists in the worst situations, even that of an orphaned boy exposed to the harshness of life at a very young age. Understandably, the book's vivid criminals make it into the film, including the cunning Fagin (Ben Kingsley), his protégé, the Artful Dodger (Harry Eden), and the brutish Bill Sikes (Jamie Foreman). Also understandably (since they're boring), most of the kinder souls are left back on the page, yielding Oliver's chances for happiness to a fallen woman of abject devotion (Leanne Rowe) and an old bachelor who's primarily a symbol of gentility (Edward Hardwicke).

With such feeble champions as this the movie looks elsewhere for complexity and meaning, and it settles upon Fagin. (As did "Oliver!" to better effect in '68.) This is where I take issue with Polanski's deviation from the source. The bitter upshot of Dickens' novel is that the horror from which Oliver must be rescued (by God and writer's prerogative) is indicative of the failings of mankind, and in the morass of society gone wrong no one is as despicable as Fagin. While he lets Sikes off as an animal barely superior to a dog, Dickens describes Fagin as intelligent yet "vile" and repeatedly likens him to the devil. Polanski might find irony in a lawless father figure for an innocent boy, but he avoids the one grimly fascinating part of the story: how Fagin, viewing Oliver as a tool, tries to force-feed him a sense of shame which will enslave him to a life of crime forever. Fagin's ruthlessness, not Sikes' violence, is the most frightening power in the book and as much to blame for the murder at the end. When Fagin is made to be sympathetic, the bottom drops out of the tale; and when the good Christians whom Dickens viewed as Oliver's saviors are marginal or absent (however dull they may be), what's left is a moderately engrossing history of a boy almost unwittingly preserved by crooks for a destiny of vague respectability. If Dickens erred in neglecting his characters to focus on the social ills they represent, Polanski errs in turning Dickens' real villain into an odd manifestation of the kindness of strangers. His version is not a faithful adaptation, nor does it contain an especially invigorating twist.

Copyright © 2005 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.