REVIEWED - OLIVER TWIST: There may be no particularly good reason for yet another Oliver Twist, but Roman Polanski's version is admirably unsentimental, writes Donald Clarke
There may not have been a live-action, cinema version of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist since the musical Oliver! in 1968, but this story is so familiar and the literary adaptation is such a stodgy genre that the viewer has the right to ask exactly what Roman Polanski is putting forward as his Unique Selling Point here.
Ben Kingsley's Fagin does occupy a previously under-investigated middle-ground between the diabolical territory mapped out by Alec Guinness in David Lean's 1948 version and the playful demimonde of Ron Moody in Oliver!. Leanne Rowe brings welcome fire and surliness to her Nancy, a role treated cautiously in earlier versions lest the tender observer jump to conclusions as to how the poor girl earns a crust. And Rachel Portman's jaunty score breaks new ground in its ability to irritate even while lodging permanently in the brain.
All of these things could, however, be easily accommodated in a high- quality telly adaptation. Ronald Harwood's competent script, which deftly fillets out some of Dickens's more preposterous coincidences, would also work well before Songs of Praise. And the sets, though a little too redolent of their Czech origins, have that just-dressed quality so beloved of the BBC in the Onedin Line era.
No, the USP of this Oliver Twist is, presumably, to do with the wartime experiences of its director. Cast adrift in Poland after his Jewish parents were sent to concentration camps, the young Polanski lived a similarly peripatetic life to that of Dickens's hero.
There is a welcome matter-of-factness to the first half of the film which suggests a director, seared by reality, consciously shunning melodrama and sentimentality. We first meet Oliver (Barney Clark, restrained, undemonstrative), an orphan, being led to a workhouse in the West-Midlands. After gamely walking through the gruel scene, he has an encounter with a fabulously malevolent chimneysweep, before being sold to an undertaker whose kindly outlook is not shared by his severe wife. Awful things happen and he ends up trudging his way towards London, sly Fagin, brutal Bill Sykes, soft-hearted Nancy and, ultimately, his boring, middle-class saviour, Mr Brownlow.
Like Dickens, Polanski finds it easy to make evil interesting, but appears bored by virtue. Whether this is to do with his early experiences we cannot know, but, irrespective of what fuels the director's talent, the first hour of the picture works considerably better than we have a right to expect. After that, the familiarity of the situations does begin to breed seeds of contempt.
But what of the Jewish question? The fact that Polanski's parents were victims of the Holocaust may relieve him of any accusations of anti-Semitism, but it does nothing to ameliorate the novelist's original offence. Towards the close of his career Dickens became sufficiently aware of his transgressions in Oliver Twist, his second novel, to consciously create a kindly Jew for Our Mutual Friend, his last completed book. Keep that in mind when you observe the big nose and stringy red curls Polanski has stuck on Kingsley. This is still dangerous material.
