It’s a steep challenge reclaiming “Oliver Twist” from the bloated comforts of dinner theater, where overemoting actors must shout and cackle to be heard over the clatter of steam-table lids.
Oliver’s tale is so familiar by now, after so many tellings on film, TV and the stage of your local country playhouse, we need major persuading to open our hearts for the little orphan once again.
Roman Polanski is certainly the director to try. A victim and scholar of strife and heartache, Polanski could have made Oliver as haunting as his 2002 Academy Award-winning film, “The Pianist.” Yet his new effort falls just short. It’s as if Polanski were torn between making a fairy tale for his young children and freshening an object lesson for adults.
“Oliver Twist” flip-flops uneasily between the jaunty notes of a plucky boy and the screeching horror strings of evil grown-ups. Polanski ends on the right tone, a dim glimmer of dawn after a terrifying night. But he has to twist his own earlier intentions to get there.
“Oliver Twist” was Charles Dickens’ most strident demand to shrink growing class divides in 19th-
century Britain. Oliver is raised at a workhouse orphanage after the death of his mother and forced to pick oakum from frayed rope, hour after hour.
Polanski makes the orphanage officials ruddy buffoons, but they are horrid and deserve a hearty flogging. The other boys treat Oliver badly, too, forcing him to make the famously suicidal claim for more porridge at breakfast.
One problem for any Oliver adaptation is that the titular boy is a fairly dull character. Things happen to the lad, but he doesn’t do much; he is polite and bland, while everyone around him is sinister and interesting. He was Dickens’ dewy-eyed kitten poster for world reform, and yet you can’t hang a whole movie on him. Barney Clark won the part with an appropriately cherubic face but without having to do much in the actual film.
“Oliver Twist,” then, becomes a showcase for showy adults, with rich parts like Fagin, the wretched old thief who coddles runaway boys in London but puts them in harm’s way to steal precious goods. Ben Kingsley here offers one of the finest Fagins ever, making the nearly broken man touching right up to the moment he twists the knife in his friends’ backs.
Jamie Foreman also does yeoman’s work making chief thug Bill a wretched menace. A trap for Polanski and other adaptors is what to do with Bill’s doomed girlfriend, Nancy. She’s the only one in the entire story who goes out of her way to do the right thing and is murdered for her trouble. She’s then quickly forgotten in favor of recounting the fate of the band of boy criminals under Fagin.
It may seem a small point to say Polanski’s sets are too clean and well-made, but it goes with the complaint about tone. In re-creating the foul streets of London, Polanski gets the shape right without throwing on enough dirt.
Dickens was a master at shaming the public with a brutal view of its own decay. Too often this “Oliver Twist” looks like the Disney version of splintered rails and rancid streets. The lack of atmosphere lets the adults bluster unconvincingly, as if they are just playacting at being mean until somebody in the 20th century forces them to play nice.
When Polanski turns out the lights near the end, he takes it even further than some of the more pessimistic versions of “Oliver.” We visit a deteriorating Fagin on death row, as they build the gallows just outside the window, and Kingsley’s desperation is brutally honest. Polanski is right in that some children can handle the old-fashioned dark fairy tales, but this scene is powerfully disturbing, and parents are forewarned.
I know, I’m sounding as unpredictable as Fagin himself: Is the movie too light or too heavy? A little of both, and in more than one wrong place.
The next version of “Oliver Twist” calls for a young director full of anger and bile. Dickens deserves someone retelling the classic story as full-on nightmare instead of ultimately reassuring daydream. One rescued orphan still leaves behind a dormitory full of unhappy truth.
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-820-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com.
** 1/2 | “Oliver Twist”
PG-13 for adult situations, some violence|2 hours|DRAMA|Directed by Roman Polanski; written by Ronald Harwood, based on the novel by Charles Dickens; starring Ben Kingsley, Barney Clark, Jamie Forman, Harry Eden and Leanne Rowe|Opens today at area theaters.
