An early, inferior work by Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1837) has nonetheless touched the popular imagination more than anything else by the Victorian novelist, with the exception, of course, of A Christmas Carol. Everything is relative, and in fact, while not one of the glories of the Dickens œuvre, Oliver Twist is not so god-awful. Its portrait of a Victorian workhouse, London’s criminally infested underbelly, and the plight of orphaned and abandoned children take aim at social injustice, if only in an anecdotal, less than penetrating way. (There is also an autobiographical element, since Dickens himself was sent to work in a London factory when he was twelve owing to his father’s confinement in Marshalea debtor’s prison.) In Carlyle and Dickens, quoting critics Edgar Johnson, Humphry House and G. H. Ford, Michael Goldberg writes:
In his earlier novels Dickens was attacking “isolated abuses,” dreadful enough in themselves but disconnected, and he laid responsibility for them at the hands of “individual knaves and dullards—ignorant parish officials. bullying magistrates, greedy usurers, brutal schoolmasters, lordly wastrels, dishonest lawyers, and a misgoverning aristocracy.” Dickens did not see society as a whole though he saw that “there was evil in all its parts.” Such an analysis led him to assume that the evils stemming from bad laws or personal cruelty could be rectified by intelligent reform or offset by personal kindliness. . . . If the law in Oliver Twist could be comically routed by Mr. Bumble [the beadle]’s “If the law supposes that . . . the law is a ass—a idiot,” in [the more mature, 1852] Bleak House the law has become a “monstrous maze” . . .
Dickens would arrive, then, at a more comprehensive view of society and of society’s ills. In his mid-twenties at the time of Oliver Twist, however, Dickens had not yet advanced to a holistic grasp of anything. One of the novel’s strengths, though, is the clarity of the mirror that it holds up to contemporary life, especially the hard times suffered by boys who struggle to survive on and just off the streets.
One of the ways in which film versions of Oliver Twist fall short of the novel—not counting all the television versions, there have been more than a dozen such films—is that they aren’t funny. Dickens’s facetious, sometimes hilarious omniscient narrator (especially early on) mediates between the reader and the book’s melodramatic story and many miserable events, but even the lighter Twist movies omit the narration or some correlative to this essential element of the novel’s achievement. Listen to this voice as it addresses the subject of Twist’s birth:
. . . there was considerable difficulty in inducing Oliver to take upon himself the office of respiration,—a troublesome practice, but one which custom has rendered necessary to our easy existence . . . Now, if, during this brief period, Oliver had been surrounded by careful grandmothers, anxious aunts, experienced nurses, and doctors of profound wisdom, he would most inevitably and indubitably have been killed in no time. There being nobody by, however, but a pauper woman, who was rendered rather misty by an unwonted allowance of beer[,] and a parish surgeon who did such matters by contract[,] Oliver and Nature fought out the point between them. . . .
Something of the Artful Dodger can be heard in this voice of a young smart aleck. It isn’t all joke and mirrors, though. The humor helps usher in, through a narrative back door, two intertwined themes: poverty and its consequences; Nature vs. nurture. Oliver Twist would be much the worse without its sophomoric wit.
Dickens eases this voice out of comedy and into sentiment by and by; but our recollection of its edgier incarnation, and of the harshness of life to which it responds, tempers the sentimental silliness of the boy’s subsequent good fortune, the unlikely restoration to him of his unlikely good name and status and unlikely wealth. Bereft of its comical narration, movies based on the book have proven themselves thinner and less palatable than the book.
Up until now, that is. From France, United Kingdom, and Czech Republic, Roman Polanski’s new film version of Oliver Twist, although (again) not funny, at least not in the way that Dickens’s novel is, strikes me as a fine achievement in its own right. I think I know why. Working from a script by Ronald Harwood, as well as the reservoir of memories of when, both his parents having been shipped to Auschwitz during the Second World War, as a boy he, too, struggled to survive and elude capture, Polanski has come up with a fresh, original take on the Dickens material. His film is not an adaptation of the novel, although (as far as I know) this is how it has been universally received; rather, it is a companion-piece, if you will, an expansive footnote, to the novel—Oliver Twist from Oliver Twist’s own point of view as the experiences that befall him unfold. This subjectivism may narrow the range of the Dickens material, but it also deepens this material’s trenchant humanity, and it most certainly eliminates the possibility of, as well as any need for, the novel’s narration, which as a result, in its familiar absence, on this occasion we do not find ourselves missing.
There are two categories of plot elements contained in Polanski’s film, both of them in tune with the point of view of the protagonist, whom we first meet here when he is nine years old. In one category are events Twist himself experiences. In the other are events that he would have learned about and that are shown here in the manner that he, at his age, would have understood them. Thus the scenes of his birth and his mother’s death are excluded, as is the whole complicated subplot of his disinheritance, which, in fact, has been excluded from other versions as well.
The subjectivism of Polanski’s slant on the material accounts for the startling point-of-view shot of Oliver’s looking up from the London pavement at the adults who have nabbed him for a street pickpocketing that was actually executed by two other boys, members of Fagin’s pickpocketing crew. But its most extensive application can be seen in Polanski’s portrayals of Bill Sykes and Fagin.
A number of commentators have noted that Sykes, a graduate of Fagin’s criminal crew, has never been more terrifying than he is in this film. In truth, I find Sykes almost invariably scary, no matter what the version, but I understand, I think, what others are responding to and am prepared to describe the effect of Polanski’s portrait differently. In the novel, and more or less in the various films of the book, it is understood that Sykes represents what the future might hold for current younger members of Fagin’s group—the Artful Dodger, for instance. A vicious criminal isn’t born; he (or she) is molded by environment into a base nature, and this environment includes, in the case of Sykes, such elements as poverty, limited or absent opportunity to advance socially or financially, and the exploitation Sykes suffered as a child at Fagin’s hands, which now prompts him in a retaliatory and “empowering” tables-turning, more or less, to lord over, even terrorize, Fagin himself. Polanski’s reliance on Twist’s point of view necessarily excludes all this sociological and psychological contextualization. Indeed, as a companion-piece to the novel, Polanski’s film implicitly refers us to the text to consider all sorts of elements that the film excludes, including these. Wrenched from the matrix of these contextualizing elements, Sykes is seen precisely in terms of his behavior and actions and apart from his dire, convoluted circumstance. Watching the film, we see Bill as ten-year-old, impounded Oliver sees him, as an inexplicable bully and menace, a looming figure in the small orphan’s waking nightmare.
For a later edition of the novel, Dickens replaced numerous instances of the words “the Jew” with “Fagin,” the name of the character at issue, because it was never his intention to curry anti-Semitic f[l]avor. On the contrary, very much like Shakespeare’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Fagin is the result not only of poverty but of the range of opportunities from which Jewish people were (still) specifically shut out for no other reason than that they were Jewish. In an annoyingly obtuse piece about the film in The New Yorker, Anthony Lane (who, incidentally, consistently misspells Sykes’s name!) bemoans the fact that, while Polanski allows no verbal reference to Fagin’s being Jewish he nonetheless gives Fagin a stooped aspect, hooked nose, and a shock of red hair—familiar traits of Jewish caricature. Lane suggests that Polanski might have done better to reimagine Fagin entirely. Polanski, whose parents were Jewish and whose mother perished at Auschwitz, isn’t “changing” anything, nor should he. Fagin is still Jewish, but there is no overt reference to the fact because his Jewishness would have no meaning, much less relevance, to Oliver Twist. Polanski’s great coup is that he provides an incarnation of Fagin, in such a context (or, I should say, the absence of the familiar context), that allows us to see two things: Fagin as Twist sees him; Fagin as Fagin sees himself. Polanski’s Fagin is a man whose humanity has diminished because he has slipped into self-caricature as a result of the caricatures of Jews imposed on him and others by Christian society at large. Thus Polanski refreshes our grasp of Dickens’s intent. His Fagin, while retaining all chords of Fagin’s pitiable loathsomeness, is emblematic of the outcome of a dynamic of human reduction owing to ethnic and religious bigotry and the consigning of an ethnic group, to which Fagin belongs, to the status of outcast. Here, too, Polanski isn’t re-creating the text in a different medium but working with the text.
Polanski’s Nancy, Bill’s lover, is blatantly a prostitute, Sykes her pimp—points most other film versions have blurred. This may seem to be a deviation from Oliver’s innocent point of view. It is not, because Polanski never shows Nancy with a trick. Rather, Polanski, better than any other filmmaker who has tackled the book, clarifies why the hearts of Oliver and the other boys go out to her and so despise Bill for killing her. She is one of them, under the thumbs of Sykes and Fagin, someone who cannot call her life her own. She must do what she must do to survive and must do this at the bidding of others. Sykes’s tyrannizing her is the part they see; her making her (and part of Sykes’s and perhaps Fagin’s) living is not a part they see, nor do we. We do see her and a sister of the streets hanging around Fagin’s hideout, and such scenes poignantly underscore that they also are children, or scarcely more than children. Nancy’s murder at Bill’s hands, because he feels she has betrayed him to the police (which she hasn’t), has never been so shattering in a film. The interaction between text and film that Polanski’s method entails brought to my attention something I had always missed when reading the book; but it makes perfect sense. Nancy is not only trying to save Oliver Twist; when she goes behind Bill’s back and betrays Fagin, she is also (however unconsciously) trying to redeem Bill from the past with Fagin that has turned him into the harsh and brutal soul he has become. And this insight that the film provides lends a terrible irony to Nancy’s end that is quite beyond what the book on its own delivers.
Frankly, before I saw Polanski’s film I didn’t think there was anything more I could get out of Oliver Twist!
Polanski, who won a richly deserved Oscar for The Pianist (2002), has made wonderful films (The Fat and the Lean, 1961; Knife in the Water, 1963; The Fearless Vampire Killers, 1967) and deplorable ones (Chinatown, 1974; Pirates, 1986; Death and the Maiden, 1994). The quality of most of his films falls somewhere in between. His Oliver Twist, which I fear is what he made instead of the film of Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird that I long have hoped he would make, belongs in the first of the three categories. He has said that he made it for his own children, and it is something no one should miss.
