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There would, I think, be room for a modernisation of Oliver Twist, with Oliver perhaps liberated from a sweatshop sewing logos onto trainers and the Artful Dodger at the head of several ASBO-touting wastrels committing online identity fraud. This isn’t that film, and after The Pianist, Polanski’s previous work, the story of an orphan abandoned to the bleakest of worlds could seem like even more of a retread of already familiar material.

Fortunately, the story is strong enough to survive another telling, and becomes especially compelling for the veil of gloom the director throws over it. Polanski has unearthed a good Oliver in Barney Clark, who seems lived-in rather than stage school-educated. If the title role is one of the classics’ great chameleon roles, forcing Oliver to adapt to each new situation, Clark scrubs up well for the scenes at Brownlow (Edward Hardwicke)’s house, but also wears the character’s sad eyes and suppurating feet in ways that never feel coached or cosmetic.

In fact, the casting is one of the strengths of this version. While exiled in France, Polanski appears to have been watching a lot of British film and television, or maybe casting director Celestia Fox has been doing that for him. (Or perhaps British actors come as cheap as the Prague locations.) Whichever way: from Mark Strong as Toby Crackit, a highwayman without a horse, to Turbo as Bill Sykes’ dog Bullseye, the casting works.

Ben Kingsley, after playing Asians (Gandhi), Arabs (House of Sand and Fog) and Cockneys (Sexy Beast), is too precise an actor to deny Fagin’s Jewishness, always a source of some contention. (Rachel Portman’s mournful Yiddish theme for the character means you can’t help but notice.) But in this incarnation, Fagin is more rounded: a sad, pathetic man all too conscious of his place in London’s criminal hierarchy, loyal to his young boys but forever bullied by the monstrous Sykes (Jamie Foreman). Foreman was presumably cast for the Nil By Mouth connection: a perennial screen wide boy, he here makes the relationship between Sykes and Nancy (Leanne Rowe, on bosom-heaving duty) that of an abusive spouse and a long-suffering partner, one of the film’s few concessions to contemporary mores.

There’s a sense this material is better suited to a director like Polanski, whose life and work share an understanding of how cruel and forbidding the world can be, than it was to a sentimentalist like Lean, who made the still-definitive 1948 film version. This Oliver’s interiors have the sallowy look of period drama cliché, but the film is at its most expressive when suggesting how those candles might get snuffed out. “Please don’t leave us with no light,” one of the Dodger’s gang pleads with Sykes, as the villain storms into the Spitalfields slums for the final showdown with the hero. Compared to the breezy, picturesque adaptation of Pride & Prejudice that did the rounds last year, Polanski’s Twist is English literature with all the blinds down.

 

Mike McCahill on 20th December 2005
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