There’s not much to say about Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist other than that it faithfully reproduces Charles Dickens’ novel without markedly improving upon David Lean’s lush 1948 version. Beginning with a woodcut opening credit sequence transforming into a live-action scene, Polanski’s film captures the grimy, unforgiving nastiness of a Victorian London in which maltreated young orphans – beaten for wanting a bit more gruel, and denigrated for having no parents – dream of familial stability while being driven to careers as pickpockets. Polanski’s frame is bursting with cockeyed angles which mirror his myriad characters’ varying motivations (and movement up and down the social ladder), but there’s something drearily straightforward about his presentation of Oliver’s (Barney Clark) escape from a prison-like orphanage, stint working with the Artful Dodger (Harry Eden) for the nefarious Fagin (Ben Kingsley, in a performance that fails to transcend the character’s inherent anti-Semitic construction), and eventual ascension out of the gutter. Technically accomplished and frequently engaging, there’s nonetheless no burning passion or urgency in Polanski’s Oliver Twist, an unnecessary and conservative adaptation that feels innocuous when it should be, per Dickens’ source material, bleak and menacing.
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