Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist (Director: Roman Polanski)













Icon Polanski--what is he best known for? Chinatown? Rosemary's Baby? His girlfriend Sharon Tate getting murdered by the Manson familiy? Statutory rape that led to his self-exile to Europe? What an intriguing story Polanski's own life could make as a film--I'm sure it will happen in twenty years or so. Besides those two big movies I mentioned, Polanski is also known for 1965's Repulsion, 1979's Tess, the Harrison Ford missing-wife thriller Frantic, a slew of misfires in the nineties that include Death and the Maiden, Bitter Moon, and The Ninth Gate, and his Oscar-winning direction in 2002's The Pianist. This Oliver Twist looks to be the 19th version made from the Charles Dickens novel, the most popular seeming to be David Lean's 1948 incarnation. To quote Homer Simpson in Season 6's "The Springfield Connection:" These are the people who saw an overcrowded marketplace and said, "Me too!"

Oliver Twist (Barney Clark) is an orphan, and when he daringly asks for more gruel (sweet, nourishing gruel!) at a religious orphanage, he is then marked as a problem child and the powers that be try to foist him upon exploitative families, which in the grand tradition of people being ridiculously cruel somehow doesn't work. He fends for himself, discovers a so-called friend in Artful Dodger (Harry Eden), and finds acceptance into a den of thieves led by Fagin (Ben Kingsley). Poor, "green" Oliver gets caught up in all the stealing and is actually sent to court where he is released on the basis of no evidence, taken into the home of Mr. Brownlow (Edward Hardwicke), who finally makes Oliver feel wanted. But, whoa is Oliver, because the thieves and the thieving children and slightly more psychotic boss Bill Sykes (Jamie Foreman) fear he will tattle like the unwanted stepchild he is, and seek to continue his misery.

I've never read the novel, nor seen any other version of this, but what seemed to be lacking was...Oliver Twist. This is his story and he seems to vanish from it from time to time. He is in many scenes where he is merely being talked about. Maybe that's how it's supposed to be, but that's a fundamental lack in pulling for the kid. Or maybe because it's a bit drably told--you'd expect a little more from Polanski but this is very straightforward. Perhaps I'm being short-sighted, but I think there probably could have been a little more reverence for a novel with this kind of pedigree. This is the kind of movie you very well would see on The Disney Channel or some sort of family cable service, like PAX. It begins fairly satirical, as Dickens likely made it out to be, but then that gets lost too.

A puzzling entry from Polanski, especially considering there are other stories that haven't been done to death like this one.