Oliver Twist
Polanski’s Oliver Twist – Not Mean, Not Lean
By S. P. Somtow
While Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist is one of the most popular Victorian novels among the high school lit set, literary critics are often quick to point out that it’s one of Dickens’s earlier and less accomplished works. They tend to point instead to such masterpieces as Bleak House, amazing for its richness and stylistic invention, as the real, mature Dickens.
The main criticisms leveled against Oliver Twist are that its plot mechanisms, based on mind-boggling coincidence, are particularly creaky, especially when Oliver’s accidental benefactor turns out to “just happen” to be his grandfather: that young Oliver, who has spent his entire life amongst the dregs of society, manages somehow to be the only person in the environment with an upper-class accent and what could be perceived as aristocratic moral values — and, in this more culturally sensitive time, anti-semitism, because the wicked Fagin is presented as a stereotypical caricature, and referred to throughout the novel as “The Jew”.
It’s very interesting to see how Roman Polanski, in this most recent of several cinematic versions of Oliver Twist, deals with Dickens, and reimagines this novel for a contemporary sensibility. It’s also instructive to compare the film with David Lean’s 1948 version, which many people will still consider the film of Oliver Twist even after appraising the many virtues of Polanski’s production.
The Lean film is of course not the only movie of this much-filmed classic — there are about eleven versions extant, depending on what you count. There’s the silent film which was a vehicle for Jackie Coogan with a magnificently weird Lon Chaney as Fagin, a number of made-for-TV versions, at least one animated edition, and the very popular Oliver! a film of Lionel Bart’s best-selling musical which is perhaps the polar opposite of Dickens’ dark indictment of Britain’s societal ills. Most recently, Richard Dreyfuss appeared in a somewhat hammy portrayal of Fagin, with Elijah Wood as the Artful Dodger … this version, produced by Disney, was as saccharine-laden as Oliver! without even the excuse of being a musical.
But it’s the Lean film which has influenced all the other renditions, its moody chiaroscuro and starkly delineated characters creating a vision of Dickensian London that, even today, people think of as the real thing.
I noticed that many people in the audience at the Asian premiere of Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist made the assumption that his film was less faithful to the book than Lean’s. I heard a lot of mumbling about the movie’s penultimate scene, with Fagin railing in his prison cell and Oliver achieving some kind of forgiveness. One person said to me, “Ah, you see, in this modern age, Polanski felt compelled to add a sort of ‘New Age’ redeeming bit to the story. And Oliver’s monologue there … laying on a bit thick, wasn’t it?”
Actually, the scene, and its over-wrought dialogue, are pretty much exactly as in the book. It goes to show just how influential Lean’s film is — people have come to think that it is the book.
Yes, it’s true that Polanski’s film makes a number of concessions to modern sensibilities. The unbelievably strained coincidence by which Oliver, it turns out, was actually related to Mr. Brownlow has gone. The film makes perfectly good sense without it.
I was wondering, however, how Polanski would deal with the anti-semitism of Dickens. After all, the Lean film was actually banned in the U.S. for a time, and when finally released, had certain scenes, such as Alec Guiness as Fagin gleefully counting his money, omitted. Dickens himself, when criticized for harping on Fagin’s ethnos, said “it unfortunately was true of the time to which that story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew.” Roman Polanski’s Oscar, as we all know, was for The Pianist, so naturally a burning question going into this film is, How is he going to handle this issue?
I waited throughout the entire movie to see if the Jewish shoe would drop, but it didn’t. From this perspective, I think we can say that the film has been sanitized. If this is your benchmark of fidelity to the Dickension vision, you are not going to like the film. If this is how you feel, Alec Guinness’s over-the-top portrayal in Lean’s version is never going to be outdone by Ben Kingsley’s, even though this is a brilliant performance in every way … rarely has an actor so thoroughly submerged his ego as Kingsley does in this portrayal. I didn’t even recognize him for the first half hour of the film.
Indeed, it’s by comparing the two Fagins that you get to heart of why these two films are so different. David Lean’s Fagin is much larger than life, and he is also two-dimensional. Yet it was E.M. Forster who pointed out that two-dimensionality is an inherent characteristic of Dickens’s worldview … he has said the Dickens is the only great novelist to get away with two-dimensional characters, and that his “immense success with types suggests that there may be more in flatness than the severer critics admit.” Roman Polanski’s Fagin is clearly three-dimensional.
David Lean’s exploitation of black-and-white photography makes the very most out of two-dimensionality, while Polanski uses all the resources of colour to underline the complexities of his characters. Both films vividly depict Victorian London although I think that Polanski’s version was actually shot in Prague. And both films are true to a central Dickensian tenet: that young Oliver, despite never having known a decent home or a “moral” environment, is somehow innately pure and innocent, an ideal that cannot be influenced by the world around him.
Which film is better, and which is more like Dickens? These are two completely different questions, but on the second one I think that Lean clearly wins despite the omission of the famous prison scene. But on many levels, Polanski’s version is more believable, more well-rounded, and more optimistic film than Lean’s, and in particular the performance of Ben Kingsley makes the character — and by extension the entire film — both more human and more humanist.
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Somtow with Roman Polanski just after the Asian premiere of Oliver Twist
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