Oliver Twist

The safest thing for a film maker to do in adapting the classics is to record the text without really translating it for the newer medium. In the past this meant starting with a shot of the 'great book' being opened to display the title page. Polanski makes do with a black and white frontispiece, a sign he and writer Ronald Harwood have wrestled respectfully with Dickens and Dickens has won. The film has a period polish but the look of it is so familiar as to seem cliched. The large cast of characters features every known face from British 'heritage' adaptations for film and TV. It is as if a wonderful troupe of travelling players has rolled into town with their latest interpretation from the Victorian repertory. A summary is hardly necessary, is it... orphan suffers and falls in with a bad crowd, but comes to good end in Victorian England? The best thing in this adaptation is the relationship between Oliver (Barney Clark) and Fagin (Ben Kingsley). Polanski, Harwood and Kingsley bring a complexity to it that allows us see that the desperation of Oliver's circumstances - the complete aloneness, the exploitation, surviving against the odds - has been lived through by Fagin, costing him much of his humanity. Nor is the audience allowed to forget Fagin's Jewishness. He is neither Fiddler on the Roof or Shylock but his origins in the shtetls or ghettos of Eastern Europe, driven out by pogrom or privation, are in his speech and performance and are subtly mixed into the soundtrack.