>>REVIEW
OLIVER TWIST
STARRING Barney Clark and Ben Kingsley
DIRECTED BY Roman Polanski
Opens Friday, September 30
Check listings
When I found out that Roman Polanski was making Oliver Twist, my initial thought was "What’s the point?" The Charles Dickens story, which is a fine one, has been filmed numerous times and it didn’t seem like there was much need for yet another version.
That said, Polanski’s first film after his unexpected Oscar win (for best director for The Pianist) is a finely acted, well-shot family film. Newcomer Barney Clark is delightful as the well-meaning, mistreated Oliver, but Ben Kingsley steals the show as the malevolent, miserly Fagin.
Adults likely know the story – young Oliver, an orphan who gets kicked out of his orphanage and makes his way to London, falls in with a band of young pickpockets who work for a hideous hunchback named Fagin – but youngsters will undoubtedly latch onto the tale for the first time. And Polanski, for his part, makes the most of the cast and setting. His early-19th-century London comes alive through its evocation of the haves and have-nots. Like the director’s vision of Warsaw in The Pianist, which went from a flourishing metropolis to a bombed-out deserted city, his portrayal of London is equally stunning. From the dirty side streets and tenements where Fagin and his gang live, to the upscale mansions on the outskirts of the city, Polanski’s snapshot of London never looks like a movie backlot. (it was largely shot in Prague.)
The film, which follows Oliver as he hunts for a place to call home and has run-ins with a series of callous and dangerous adults, is best when it portrays the strange bond between the orphan and Fagin. As played by Kingsley, the wretch is as pathetic as he is cruel. Sending out his gang of young whores and pickpockets to collect food, money and whatever else they can steal, Fagin presides over a dysfunctional little family that Oliver falls into for better and worse. Fagin is part abuser and part father and that is what’s most interesting.
That Polanski experienced being young and alone in a big city is also of note. The director, who escaped the Warsaw ghetto – his parents were taken to concentration camps during the Second World War – wandered the Polish countryside and learned, like Oliver, to take charity where he could find it. In light of the director’s own past, the film takes on more meaning than just another adaptation of a familiar Dickens tale. |
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