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"Oliver Twist"

by Open-Publishing - Saturday 24 September 2005

Cinema-Video Religions-Beliefs

Roman Polanski’s astonishing film exquisitely captures both the anger and the cruel beauty of Dickens’ great novel.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Sometimes you look at a movie
adaptation of a classic book and it’s as if you’re
reading it with the filmmaker, turning the pages
together. Roman Polanski’s "Oliver Twist" takes the
useless question of whether reading is "better" than
moviegoing and renders it academic: This is that rare
movie version of a great novel in which watching is
reading.

Dickens’ novel about a gentle-spirited orphan who’s
failed at every turn by the system set up to protect him
is an indictment of the barbarism that thrives beneath
the veneer of the most civilized societies; it’s also a
long, anguished wail over the willful ignorance and
selfishness of us wretched humans, who were supposedly
created in God’s image but rarely live up to the honor.
"Oliver Twist" would be a dreadfully moralistic book if
it weren’t such a deeply pained one, and Polanski is
fully in tune with both its anger and its cruel beauty.
This story hasn’t been so much adapted for the screen as
absorbed into it, and the biographical implications of
that are unnerving: Could anyone understand "Oliver
Twist" better than a Polish Jew who spent his childhood
outrunning the Nazis?

The picture has a melancholy glow to it, like the
pearly, diffuse light cast by a full moon on a hazy
night. In the movie’s brutally poetic climax Polanski
actually shows us a moon like that, both an accusatory
witness and a soothing presence, and for a moment we
wonder if we’re dreaming it. This is a picture that so
sensitizes us to human suffering that even looking at
the moon hurts.

Polanski opens his movie with an engraving of the
English countryside, one that gradually transforms
itself into a black-and-white image and then into color
— dusty brown tones more bleak than black-and-white
could ever be. A large man, the beadle, Mr. Bumble
(Jeremy Swift), and a small boy, Oliver (Barney Clark),
walk through this landscape, headed toward Oliver’s
uncertain future. Born in a workhouse (his mother died
in childbirth), he’s now 9 years old and the authorities
have to find a use for him. He appears before the
workhouse board members, one of whom asks him, "Do you
pray for those who feed you and take care of you, like a
Christian?" even though we can see by his fragile, bony
frame that no one has been taking care of him at all.

Oliver is almost sold to a villainous chimney sweep
(although sold isn’t the right word, as the state would
have offered the man 5 pounds to take Oliver off its
hands), and spends a brief time as an undertaker’s
apprentice. But Oliver’s future has been foreordained by
the people who are supposed to care for him — "Mark my
words, you’ll see him hang, it can’t be too soon," they
say — not because of anything inherent in his nature,
but because in their small-mindedness they can’t imagine
any other fate for him. To wish him dead is easier than
wishing him invisible.

So Oliver runs away and finds a home with people who, at
the very least, actually see him. Polanski has put Ben
Kingsley in the role of Fagin, the twisted old schemer
who supports a coterie of boys (and a few girls) to pick
pockets for him, and who assumes a complicated,
conflicted role as both Oliver’s protector and betrayer.
And while Dickens refers to Fagin as "The Jew," neither
his Fagin, nor Polanski’s and Kinglsey’s, is so easily
— or comfortably — reduced to the single note of anti-
Semitism. (Polanski also takes care to note how Dickens
repeatedly uses the word "Christian" with such bitter
irony, suggesting that denominational affiliations carry
far less weight with the author than human behavior
does.)

If Polanski, who’s seen the poisonousness of anti-
Semitism in his lifetime, can find compassion in
Dickens’ depiction of Fagin, how can we find fault with
it? Polanski and Kingsley give Fagin a reading that runs
deep: He’s a crook and a homemaker, a nurturer and a
potential murderer, a manipulator and a father figure
who knows the value of a kind word. And unlike the
upstanding citizens of the story — the officials who
congratulate themselves on how much good they’ve done
for Oliver and his kind — Fagin at least knows what
he’s lost. The tragedy of Fagin, particularly as
Kingsley plays him, is that he knows what decency is —
possibly because he used to have it himself.

Dickens is one of the most cinematic novelists, not just
because of his killer plots (although those certainly
don’t hurt), but because he’s so alive to faces. Even
when he doesn’t describe physical characteristics, or
tip us off with illustrative names like "Mrs.
Sowerberry" or "Mr. Bumble," we know exactly what his
characters look like: Their faces are maps of the lives
they’ve lived. Polanski has cast this "Oliver Twist" so
carefully that he could have made a decent picture just
by putting his actors in front of the camera: Clark’s
Oliver is subtly expressive (without committing the
child-actor transgression of being too expressive), and
he has the face of a Victorian engraving — you can
almost see the crosshatching of care and woe in it, but
his sturdy spirit shines through, too.

The vicious thief Bill Sikes (played by the astonishing,
nightmare-inducing Jamie Foreman) is a walking snarl, a
hulking creature whose humanity has shrunk inside him to
the size of a small, cold pebble. Pickpocket John
Dawkins, better known as the Artful Dodger, is a
prankster who takes life one pocket watch at a time, but
there’s also a sharp moral intelligence behind his
impishness. (The actor who plays him, Harry Eden, has a
face like a baby Harvey Keitel.)

And Kingsley’s face here, a maze of prosthetic warts and
wrinkles, is like a navigational chart for a lost sea.
He’s a figure of horror, holding a pair of tinsnips to
Oliver’s face when he thinks the boy has gotten a gander
at his hidden treasure, or maliciously engineering a
trade-off that will save his skin at Oliver’s expense.
Whatever goodness there is in Fagin leaks out through
the crevices of his cruelty, yet it’s unmistakable, and
heart-rending. In one scene, Fagin trains Oliver to
procure silk handkerchiefs from gentlemen’s pockets,
applauding the boy when he manages to take one off
Fagin’s person without detection. The look on Clark’s
face, when he hears those words of praise, is wrenching:
For the first time, it has the bright glow of potential
happiness.

But then the camera turns to Fagin’s face, as he urges
Oliver to learn from the other boys, particularly the
Dodger. He tells Oliver that if he does so, he’ll be
headed for great things: "You’ll be the greatest man of
the time," he says, his eyes clouding visibly, his voice
softening to a tender croak. We realize he sees the same
qualities in Oliver that we do (his purity of heart, not
merely his knack for thievery), and we also see that
he’s envisioning some dream he once had for himself,
long ago.

And beneath it all, Polanski just shows so much love for
"Oliver Twist" as a story. (After an opening that’s
faithful to the book almost note by note, he and his
screenwriter, Ronald Harwood, take some liberties by
streamlining the intricate coincidences of Dickens’
plot, but the story doesn’t suffer.) Polanski grasps the
joyousness of the story (Fagin’s lair is a pretty
cheerful place), while bringing a chilling gravity to
the picture’s pivotal scenes — most notably the murder
of Nancy (Leanne Rowe), the self-possessed trollop who
risks her life to protect Oliver. And in one of the
movie’s loveliest vignettes, the wonderful English
actress Liz Smith appears as an old country woman who
shows Oliver a few bits of kindness that mean the world
to him: When he tells her he’s going to London, her
mouth makes the shape of an "O" — it’s a place as fear-
inducing and foreign to her as it is to him.

"Oliver Twist" is sometimes treated as just a staple of
Victoriana, but it still feels connected with the world.
For one thing, the social barbarism Dickens was so
attuned to isn’t a relic. (Think how it took Katrina to
remind us of the existence of our own "hidden" poor.)
And as a meditation on both the cruelty of human beings
and the decency they’re capable of, "Oliver Twist" is
the perfect canvas for Polanski. The movie’s final
scene, in which Oliver shows compassion for a man who
would have delivered him to a murderer, is both a
horrific miniature and a benediction. In his long
career, Polanski has given us great pictures and
strange, imperfect ones. Maybe that’s the curse of a man
who sees both sides of the moon at once.

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