Please, Mr. Polanski, do we really need more?
F I L M R E V I E W Oliver Twist
Over the past 100 years,
Oliver Twist has been made into a movie or TV miniseries an average of twice a decade. And that’s not even counting the Oscar-winning musical or looser adaptations like Disney’s Oliver & Company, which turned Oliver into a lovable kitten voiced by Joey Lawrence, or Twist, Canadian director Jacob Tierney’s recent update that imagined him as a male prostitute working the streets of Toronto.
Any yet moviegoers still haven’t had their fill. Some motherless cinéaste has held out his DVD player and politely asked for more once again and, instead of pitching the wretch down a dark, thin, winding stairway without any banister, director Roman Polanski has produced the latest, but not the greatest take on Charles Dickens’ 1838 novel.
The well-worn story will be familiar to anyone who hasn’t been living in a Victorian workhouse all his life: Good-hearted orphan Oliver (Barney Clark) is apprenticed to undertaker Mr. Sowerberry after having the audacity to ask for an extra helping of gruel. After life with the Sowerberrys turns out to be only slightly less horrible than living with the Fishers from Six Feet Under, Oliver high-tails it to London (Prague, in an Oscar-worthy performance) where he is befriended by a cocky cockney scamp called the Artful Dodger (Harry Eden). The young pickpocket introduces Oliver to his underworld cohorts: a gaggle of preteen petty thieves led by the kindly criminal Fagin, the murderous Bill Sykes, and Sykes’ sweet-talking, streetwalking ladyfriend, Nancy — played by the startlingly young Leanne Rowe, whose overflowing bodice invites you to consider yourself at home.
After a run-in with the law, Oliver is given a home by rich Mr. Brownlow, and his life seems set to turn around — but just when he thinks he’s out, the criminal underbelly pulls him back in.
Oscar-winning screenwriter Ronald Harwood, who was Polanski’s write-hand man on The Pianist, has turned out an inoffensive adaptation that hews more closely to its film predecessors than the book — like most film Twists, the subplot with Oliver’s evil half-brother is cut to streamline the story. Polanski’s Oliver Twist
also follows the more recent tradition of making Sykes the one-note bad guy and humanizing Fagin. Played by an almost unrecognizable Ben Kingsley, Fagin — a complex mix of doddering father figure and selfish exploiter of children — is the primary reason to see this version.
Polanski’s only new twist is that Oliver never finds out who his mother really was — and neither does the audience. There’s no inheritance or locket to act as Deus ex machina
and lift Oliver out of poverty.
The director reportedly wanted to take all hokey coincidence out of his Oliver Twist, but in doing so he has unfortunately taken the heart of the story, too. With Oliver’s quest for his missing mother brushed over, the little tyke ends up a cherub-faced, teary prop for the other characters to kidnap, arrest or adopt at will. He feels more like a plot device than hero.
Polanski’s ( partial) elimination of coincidence doesn’t even result in a more believable tale. While there are little doses of gritty Industrial Revolution realism here — Oliver’s bloody feet after a seven-day journey to London, the flesh wound he receives in a botched robbery — there are too many mutton-chopped caricatures populating this movie to take it out of fairy-tale territory.
Anyone expecting a darkerhued Rosemary’s Orphan- style Twist will be disappointed. Polanski has made a family film that looks and feels very much like the musical Oliver! without the songs or any need for exclamatory punctuation marks. As an introduction to Dickens’ famous tale, it will do just fine — at least until the next film comes along.
National Post knestruck@ nationalpost. com