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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Roman Polanski's astonishing film exquisitely captures both the anger and the cruel beauty of Dickens' great novel.
Sep 23, 2005 | 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.
