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Oliver Twist Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG-13 (for disturbing images) Genre: Drama Theater release: September 30, 2005 by Sony Pictures Directed by: Roman Polanski Runtime: 2 hours 10 minutes Cast: Barney Clark (Oliver Twist), Ben Kingsley (Fagin), Leanne Rowe (Nancy), Jamie Foreman (Bill Sykes), Harry Eden (Artful Dodger), Edward Hardwicke (Mr Brownlow), Alun Armstrong (Magistrate Fang) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

It has been nearly a century since the first film based on Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, and the Internet Movie Database indicates there have been over two dozen adaptations since then. But once we bracket off the TV shows, the silent movies, the children's cartoons and the modernizations (such as Jacob Tierney's Twist, which concerns male prostitutes in present-day Toronto), it turns out the story has been adapted for the big screen in a more-or-less straightforward manner only four times since the advent of talking pictures.

Barney Clark plays the title character

The first was a low-budget 1933 film that no one remembers. The second was David Lean's dark, moody, Gothic 1948 masterpiece, which is unfortunately remembered today mostly for its controversial and allegedly anti-Semitic depiction of Fagin, who is played by Alec Guinness. The third was Carol Reed's 1968 adaptation of Lionel Bart's musical Oliver!—not the most direct adaptation of the novel, to be sure, but still a faithful rendition of the story and its setting; it also had a footnote in film history as the last musical to win the Oscar for Best Picture, until Chicago came along. And now there is Roman Polanski's film.

This new film reunites Polanski with screenwriter Ronald Harwood and cinematographer Pawel Edelman, both of whom worked on his Holocaust drama The Pianist. And just as that film was hailed by some as a deeply personal project for its director but criticized by others for failing to provide a particularly personal a vision of the Holocaust, so too this new version of Oliver Twist feels like a strangely personal yet detached project for its director.

As a Holocaust survivor who was only 11 years old when the war ended, and whose parents were sent to concentration camps—his mother died in one—Polanski has an obvious affinity for Oliver (Barney Clark), a 10-year-old orphan who grows up in oppressive circumstances, runs away, and hides from the authorities. After Oliver has walked miles and miles to London and worn through his shoes, the film draws our attention to his bloodied feet, and we can sense that this particular detail may reflect Polanski's own experiences roaming the Polish countryside after he escaped from the Warsaw ghetto.

Fagin (Ben Kingsley) has some words of 'wisdom' for young Oliver

But there is little else to distinguish this adaptation from any of the others. Here and there, you can sometimes see traces of Polanski's famously dark style, but for the most part, he plays it safe and, in some ways, he has even made the material lighter and easier to digest. Perhaps because the story is about children, many filmmakers have approached it as though their films should be made for children, and this version has a similar sort of Classics Illustrated air about it, right from the opening credits, which play Rachel Portman's oddly upbeat music over the nostalgic image of what looks like an antique engraving.

What darkness there is, is often played for laughs. At the beginning of the story, Oliver lives with dozens of other orphans in a poorhouse where they are basically treated like slaves: performing menial tasks, receiving no education, and fed with only the smallest portions of gruel. When Oliver is goaded by the other orphans into asking for an extra helping, the men who run the place are outraged; and because they are mostly fat, pompous buffoons—one of them inadvertently spits out some of his food as he expresses his indignation—it is difficult to take them all that seriously. Dickens' books certainly engage in caricature, but even cartoonish villains need to be menacing, and these gentlemen are not that.

Oliver (center) and his chums Charley Bates (Lewis Chase) and the Artful Dodger (Harry Eden)

Sometimes the humor works, though. After he runs away, Oliver finds a home in the slums of London with some juvenile criminals, and one day, he is mistakenly accused of picking a man's pocket when it was actually one of his new friends who did the deed. Oliver is captured by a mob and taken to court, where Mr. Brownlow (Edward Hardwicke), the man who was robbed, tries to convince the judge that the wrong boy has been arrested; but the judge is a sour fellow who looks down on plaintiff and defendant with equal contempt, and the trial takes a few absurd turns that leave Mr. Brownlow absolutely flustered.

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