Roman Polanski is an interestingly uneven director. He is capable of masterpieces such as Cul-de-Sac, Repulsion and Chinatown; he is also capable of making movies that seem to have everything in place, but don’t quite spark into life. I’d put his 2002 Oscar-winning triumph, The Pianist, into the second category and, unfortunately, his new version of Oliver Twist falls there too.
I note with interest that the publicity material refers to it as “more of a children’s story” — they don’t say more of a children’s story than what, but one presumes they are referring to the earlier versions of Charles Dickens’s novel. Those would be, among others, David Lean’s 1948 classic (the yardstick of achievement, despite the anti-Semitic caricature of Alec Guinness’s Fagin), Clive Donner’s 1982 remake (not very highly regarded), our own South-Africanised A Boy Called Twist, and the musical Oliver! — though, judging by its popularity when I was a kid, the last named is indeed deemed to be a children’s movie.
Predictably enough, Polanski’s Oliver Twist isn’t a patch on Lean’s, though Ronald Harwood’s script for Polanski does streamline the plot considerably, and to its advantage. The under-story about Oliver’s real, hidden ancestry is gone, saving today’s audience from having to ponder the outrageous coincidences Dickens often used to structure his novels.
The focus, for Polanksi and Harwood, is on the experiences of poor little Oliver himself, his lonely trek through the poverty-stricken underworld of 19th-century England. That should be enough. We don’t really need the business that reveals Oliver was a little gentleman after all — though in Lean’s movie you can ascertain this early on, because, despite his birth and childhood in the workhouse, Oliver speaks with a lovely upper-crust accent from the start. Certainly, the obsession with class, still so current in Lean’s 1940s Britain, has faded, and we can focus with Polanski and Harwood on Oliver’s central storyline. We don’t need to suspect that he’s not really a member of the lower classes to feel sympathetic towards him.
The trouble is that the narrower emphasis on Oliver (played here by Barney Clark) exposes the limitations of the story itself. Oliver is just not a very interesting character: he is more acted upon than acting. Going and asking for some more food in the orphans’ workhouse, as he famously does, is about his most assertive act in the whole movie. But, as the movie shows, he has been selected to do so by his fellow orphans, forced into it by drawing lots, so he’s not really being assertive at all.
Harwood and Polanski give us a good robbery scene that pinpoints the moral challenge Oliver has to face, and the whole thing moves smoothly towards a satisfying climax. Given Oliver’s essential passivity, what’s going on around him needs to hold the interest, and Ben Kingsley as Fagin is very good, as is Jamie Foreman as Bill Sykes; the villains, here, are certainly compelling.
And it all looks lovely, moving between gloomy grime and golden-sunset tones. Even the gloomy grime has a sort of chocolate-box veneer. You don’t get much of a sense of how truly awful the life of the impoverished in Victorian London must have been. For that, you need to see Lean’s darkly stylised black-and-white movie with its touch of the Gothic. In fact, unless you have to screen an Oliver Twist that is definitely “more of a children’s story”, one in which the edges have been bevelled away, go back to Lean’s version. For most grown-ups, Polanksi’s Oliver Twist will have you asking for more; not more of the movie, but a movie with more.