Dickens's Oliver Twist is unpretty, unsightly literature, set in a Victorian world of poverty and violence, cruel beadles, pompous magistrates and ineffectual policemen, where there are cut lips and suppurating wounds. There are no roles for Keira Knightley here. Roman Polanski has boldly seized on this campaigning classic, famously filmed by David Lean in 1948, and made it his first picture since a return to the cinematic premier league made possible by his triumphant wartime drama The Pianist. Like that feature, it is confidently adapted for the screen by dramatist and master craftsman Ronald Harwood.
The image of little Oliver Twist victimised by poverty, almost seduced by the specious excitement of crime, and then offered the possibility of a lucrative career in authorship is always compelling; it is tempting to speculate how this story would have resonated with Polanski himself. The poor orphan escaping to London? The horrific murder of Nancy? The possibility of redemption for Fagin? For Polanski, who escaped the Warsaw ghetto as a child and embarked on a brilliant adult career freighted with tragedy, the themes are probably more painful than for the rest of us. It is a curious experience to watch Polanski's meticulous and rather beautiful re-creations of the rural suburbs and teeming London streets, with St Paul's Cathedral prettily pixellated on the far horizon. All of it very much not filmed on location in the UK, lest the constables lay hands on the director and transport him to the New World.
What he makes of it is, however, simply a decent, watchable film, not obviously more powerful or personal than a teatime-telly version. It is an adaptation with gusto and spirit, content to let the central story do the work, having had a thicket of minor characters and subplots chopped out. There are no great flourishes of cinematography, no novelties of interpretation or design other than to put Fagin closer to the centre of the story and make him a little more sympathetic. This is a commanding performance from Ben Kingsley as that notoriously corrupt and corrupting paterfamilias to a bevy of young pickpockets. Where Oliver once had to pick out oakum from old rope in the workhouse, he is now taught by Fagin's boys how to "prick out" identifying initials from stolen handkerchiefs. Fagin is not overtly Jewish, incidentally, except when a newspaper report about him being wanted by the police is read out to him by Toby Crackit (Mark Strong), and an unmistakable moan of "Oy ..." escapes his lips.
Poor little Oliver, played by Barney Clark, is continuously dependent on the kindness of strangers, from the unspeakable Fagin to the gentle scholar Mr Brownlow (Edward Hardwicke) who temporarily rescues Oliver from his life of crime. But Fagin is not as bad as the black-hearted Bill Sikes (Jamie Foreman), domestic-violence culprit and pit-bull fancier, and Fagin himself has pathetic quaverings of a conscience. Kingsley's best scene is when he must lean in to Oliver and murmur into his ear, with the grotesque solicitude of a father-figure, that if the boy does not co-operate with the felonious plans in progress, he will have to frame the boy on a trumped-up capital charge. He did the same with another unfortunate, he whispers, with "evidence, not all of it precisely true ... You don't have to be guilty to be hanged, nowadays". It is enough for Polanski to bring out Fagin's Shakespearian qualities by the final curtain: he gibbers in his Newgate cell like a mixture of Malvolio and Shylock. Oliver's request for more gruel is always a showstopper, and I can never see it without thinking of Harry Secombe's apoplectic reaction, mutton-chops a-quiver, as Mr Bumble in Lionel Bart's musical version. Polanski in fact transfers the emphasis to the workhouse union's trustees and governors, obscenely stuffing themselves at what looks like a 24-hour all-you-can-eat Victorian feast. There is a passage in Anthony Trollope's novel The Warden, when Dickens is satirised as "Mr Popular Sentiment", writing the same story as Trollope about a clergyman living on an inflated stipend in contrast to his poor mendicants - but writing it with a crazy excess of satire and disapproval. Yet here the scorn always works perfectly; Polanski respectfully reproduces Dickens's combustible black-comic rage.
But despite the pain and fear, the hangings and the beatings, there is always a nagging disquiet that what Polanski thinks he is giving us is basically a much-loved children's classic. He is directing a handsome repro edition - much like the expensive octavo volumes that Oliver is fatefully charged by Mr Brownlow with delivering to London - bound in celluloid calf and lightly sprinkled with the picturesque movie dust of Old London Town. His Oliver Twist does not flag or lose its way and it is always watchable, but the book's original power and force have not been rediscovered.