![]() ![]() As in ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, ‘Chinatown’, ‘The Pianist’ and others, Polanski presents a threatening, rotten world as viewed through the eyes of a vulnerable innocent he tackles jealousy, suspicion and corruption as surely in storybook mode as through suspense, investigation or horror. From there, he joins a household of boys who are trained to steal for their master. The classic Dickens tale, where an orphan meets a pickpocket on the streets of London. It’s a truly pitiable scene that makes clearer the film’s connection to Polanski’s earlier work. Oliver Twist the modern filmed version of Charles Dickens bestseller, a Roman Polanski adaptation. Jocular ringmaster and exploitative arch-opportunist, he’s never sympathetic but always compulsively watchable – especially when at his literal wit’s end in the climactic jailhouse reunion with Barney Clark’s Oliver. ![]() But clownlike need not be pantomimic, as Ben Kingsley’s centrepiece turn as Fagin demonstrates. ![]() Varnished but still grubby, its backstreets are ripe with squalor, its impeccably cast villains no less menacing for being faintly clownlike: Mark Strong shines briefly as toothy, flame-haired dandy Crackit and Jamie Foreman makes a suitably snarly Sykes. Visually the film takes its cue from the George Cruikshank caricatures and Gustave Doré engravings associated with the novel, offering a heightened, picture-book feel. From realist flourishes (the deterioration of Oliver’s feet as he hikes to London) to witty contrasts (the workhouse master spitting out a mouthful of food when Oliver asks for more), it’s a film that does its emotional work through bold, resonant image-making.Tracing the young orphan’s progress from workhouse to the East End slum where he falls in with Fagin, the Artful Dodger et al, Ronald Harwood’s adaptation is an efficient trim-job, initially picaresque then streamlining the narrative (and excising the fairytale genealogy). What’s most impressive about Roman Polanski’s new adaptation is that it retains the book’s emotional punch and darker elements – the spectre of the gallows is a running motif – and presents them in a way likely to engage younger viewers without patronising them. As a novel, ‘Oliver Twist’ is episodic and often sentimental, especially in its wish-fulfilment ending – all too easy to serve up as saccharine ‘family-friendly’ stuff. ![]()
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