Ray Pride

Pert Barney Clark is the hopeful, battered wanderer of "Oliver Twist," and while this 11-year-old cherub-of-steel is not as wide-eyed as Adrien Brody in "The Pianist," his journey across a wretched, teeming nineteenth-century London bears similarities to that fearful adventure.

Bookended by Gustave Dore etchings, and cool without being tepid, adapted from Dickens by the 70-year-old South African-born playwright and "The Pianist" screenwriter Ronald Harwood, in Roman Polanski's hands "Oliver Twist" becomes a fable about the necessity of forgiveness, even when you have been terribly wronged, and that even bad actions can have positive consequences.

A major component of the novel is excised--Harwood says that he never could stand the central coincidence of Oliver's origins and eventual fate--which provides a substantially different perspective from many readers' experience of the novel, and certainly a gentler one, attuned to redemption rather than good fortune. Still, there's an undeniable frisson in hearing familiar moments: "Fetch the beadle! Oliver Twist has asked for more!"

Working again with cinematographer Pawel Edelman, the 72-year-old director's visual style at first works a succession of what are essentially tableaux of snippets of plot and backstory, describing Oliver's descent into failed apprenticeships, the workhouse and ultimately the thieving streets. Polanski makes a more intriguing choice as Oliver joins Fagin (Ben Kingsley), the Artful Dodger (Harry Eden, 15), vicious, cruel Bill Sykes (Jamie Foreman) and a very young Nancy (Leanne Rowe), whose bad choices force some of the churning complications. The widescreen images keep a certain distance and the compositions tend to low, very acute triangles of action. The effect isn't theatrical, but instead exploits the frame to suggest just how little latitude, or opportunity for escape or freedom, any of the characters have. A fixation, both in plot elements and symbols, on coffins and hanging helps sustain the grim mood. Oliver's unfailing manners and sweet temperament, nicely embodied by the small, eyes-wide Clark, enliven the lovingly detailed muck. Production designer Allan Starski's exterior sets are limited, but uncommonly rich, with Kings Street represented by a half-dozen or more storefronts representing still-extant businesses such as John Lobb shoemakers. (Starski reportedly raided the archives of each.)

Kingsley's Fagin is more Max Shreck than Shylock, and Kingsley says he believes the man to have been an abandoned child himself, one left on the streets of London after his Russian-born, Sephardic Jewish parents died. "Without Fagin, these children would have starved to death. It's as simple as that," he asserts. There's a touching moment where Fagin stumbles in describing the origins of a poultice he makes for Oliver's wounds, suggesting the loss of any connection to his heritage. (The 62-year-old Sir Ben is himself half Russian-Jewish.) Kingsley encouraged the young ruffians by example, staying in character, crouched over and speaking in his wheedling Fagin squeak. Fagin's lodgings have an appealing squalor as well, like a once-finely ornamented mansion gone to ghostly ruin.

"He's very serious, Sir Ben, a very serious actor," Harwood says in his orotund entertainer's tones. "Theater actors look at the text and the subtext. And Ben is like a coal miner. If you write well, you give them the clues, you know? I had no worries. I didn't go on the set. Directing is the most boring job in the world! You all love it, you all pay homage to the directors, don't you?" Harwood japes with a theatrical twinkle. "You think he's God. Well, he ain't, he's boring. Asking an actor to open a door nineteen times and then say cut, oh print!"

Some who've worked with Polanski describe a God complex. "He was 5 years old, escaped the ghetto. I've never known a life like Roman's. I don't know anyone else who's had a life like his. These things happen to him constantly!" Harwood says. "But he has had an extraordinary life and I think he saw in that something of `Oliver Twist.' This is my theory." Harwood says they speak only of the story, with Polanski expecting him to fill in the subtext. "Again, we never discussed that."

Fagin is a tragic villain but not necessarily a villain. One of the major additions by Harwood and Polanski involves small Oliver's capacity for forgiveness, even in the face of terrible facts he knows and even worse ones he will likely never know. "Exactly. I don't think I've ever written about heroes or villains, just people. He's just from the underside of society. He's in that gray area, the most fascinating area of human behavior. I don't know any heroes and you know, I don't know any villains. I personally don't, it's just not in my experience. Fagin senses goodness in Oliver. But he always does it for the wrong reasons. When he's kind, it's because he's going to send him out on a bank raid or to have him murdered the next day! I thought you should see that Oliver forgives him, there's a redemptive possibility in that scene. I think Polanski's done that last scene wonderfully." We know all the terrible things and yet Oliver forgives him. "It's. Called. Life," Harwood enunciates, eyes wide and smiling behind large aviator glasses. "It's real life."

"Oliver Twist" asks for more on Friday.

(2005-09-27)

Also by Ray Pride

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There is an instant, an exquisite, tingly fraction of an instant near the beginning of "Reel Paradise"--Steve James' documentary about a month at the end of a year spent running a movie theater at the edge of the world in Taveuni, Fiji by abrasive, larger- and skinnier-than-life onetime film projectionist and prototypical New Yorker, indie film icon John Pierson and his family--that seems to typify what a documentary filmmaker like James does so well
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For his fourth feature (after "Freaky Friday" and "Mean Girls"), director Mark Waters marvelously orchestrates the complications of a clever romantic-comedy script by veterans Leslie Dixon ("Outrageous Fortune") and Peter Tolan ("Analyze This") from a French novel
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Sympathy for the possessed
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The Politics of Love
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Tip of the Week
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