A Solemn Pleasure
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
With his perpetually moist eyes, tousled hair, and ratty shoes, 11-year-old Barney Clark seems as if he might have loped onto the “Oliver Twist” set from a Charlie Chaplin two-reeler. Roman Polanski, who has guided the boy through Ronald Harwood’s satisfying adaptation of the Charles Dickens perennial, proves surprisingly simpatico with Chaplin in his willingness to pull out the emotional stops. Polanski is still too reserved, his worldview too dour, to completely adopt Chaplin’s embracing sentimentality, but the man who gave us “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Repulsion” has made one of his most perverse moves yet: He’s created a rock-solid family film.
“Oliver Twist” has been filmed more than 20 times, and to be honest, Polanski gives no compelling reason why the world needs another take on Dickens’s 1837 serial of pickpockets and gentlemen in Victorian London. Drawing modern parallels to Dickens’s indignation over the Poor Laws isn’t on his agenda, nor is contextualizing the anti-Semitic depiction of the villainous Fagin (Ben Kingsley), as Michael Radford did Shylock in last year’s film of “The Merchant of Venice.” This “Oliver Twist” is all about Oliver Twist and the awful, marvelous things that happen to him.
Dickens’s melodramatic excesses and uplifting moral lessons are about as far as you can get from the glib one-liners and pop-culture references endemic to today’s family entertainment, and modern youngsters may be even more baffled by Oliver’s relative passivity. (Nemo could teach him a thing or two about getting out of tight spots.) But Polanski surrounds his wide-eyed hero with an array of colorful supporting players and lets the action run its tortuous, if somewhat streamlined, course, telling his story with a minimum of flash.
He and Mr. Harwood (who last collaborated on “The Pianist,” a far more nuanced picaresque) skim through the last several chapters and hack off a few characters: Monks, the villainous half brother who materializes near the end of the book with designs on the orphaned Oliver’s missing for tune, has been given the day off. Even with a slightly defanged Fagin, though, Polanski hardly abandons the whipsaw reversals of fortune that Dickens fans have lapped up for almost 200 years.
From the very first scene, in which the characters step out of a Gustave Dore etching, to a rejiggered climactic jailhouse confrontation between Oliver and Fagin, Polanski – who lost his own parents to the Nazi concentration camps when he was a year younger than Oliver – fearlessly courts pathos and almost never succumbs. The opening scenes are relentlessly grim, with their grotesquely lit adults and murky workhouse rooms filled with coffin like wooden beds. And things only get worse when Oliver falls into Fagin’s wizened hands.
Polanski neither evades nor confronts the accusations of anti-Semitism that have always plagued Fagin. He may not be referred to as “the Jew,” as he is repeatedly in the book, but the “oys” Fagin utters upon being given bad news are unmistakable. Polanski takes his time establishing him as a father figure, including a deftly staged sequence in which the urchins practice picking the old man’s pockets, but Fagin shows even more affection toward the plundered loot he serenades with a cracked falsetto. Mr. Kingsley’s performance may not be subtle, but the Fagin scenes percolate with a welcome malevolence.
Unlike so many Dickens adaptations – 2002’s “Nicholas Nickleby” jumps to mind, along with each and every “Christmas Carol” – this “Twist” features no familiar British faces besides Mr. Kingsley, and he’s almost unrecognizable underneath the stringy hair, rotting teeth, and prosthetic nose. This ends up serving the piece in surprising ways. With nary a Dench or Callow or Atkins to be found, the audience worries less about playing spot-the-Brit and more about navigating Dickens’s ever-shifting strata of high and low society. (Perhaps because the delineation between stars and extras isn’t felt as acutely, the mob of Londoners is also more of a character.)
And less famous doesn’t mean less impressive. The baddies come off particularly well: Alun Armstrong is a memorable Magistrate Fang, and Andy Linden and Chris Overton are enjoyably vile as Mr. Gamfield and Noah Claypool. Most of these performers have only a minute or two to leave an impression, and benevolence is a lot harder to convey than malice in such limited time. (Take a look at Polanski himself in “Chinatown” if you doubt it.) Nonetheless, Edward Hardwicke is effective as Oliver’s protector, the avuncular Mr. Brownlow, and Leanne Rowe gives the doomed Nancy a tattered dignity. The porcelain-skinned Mr. Clark has his limits as an actor but looks the part; Polanski directs around his emotive shortfalls and plays up Oliver’s rough-hewn passivity.
Polanski and Mr. Harwood’s sedate approach has its drawbacks. Rachel Portman’s syrupy score could fit in virtually any Victorian-era “Masterpiece Theatre” without changing a note. With the exception of one vertiginous shot of Oliver and Bill Sykes (Jamie Foreman) clambering up a steep rooftop, the action sequences are humdrum. And for all the shots of rats and chamber pots, Polanski and production designer Allan Starski never make the film’s London look like anything but a mucked-up studio set. (Prague, used so effectively in “The Pianist,” is less convincing here.)
Dickens hails one of Oliver’s brief stints out of London with this paean: “Who can tell how scenes of peace and quietude sink into the minds of pain-worn dwellers in close and noisy places, and carry their own freshness deep into their jaded hearts!” This scene has been all but eliminated from the movie, but Polanski hasn’t forgotten it. With “Oliver Twist,” one of the most jaded and worn hearts in film appears to have received its own welcome – and surprisingly infectious – dose of freshness.