For those who’d prefer not to listen to the shrill cockney choruses of Carol Reed’s 1967 musical version, this slavishly faithful adaptation should hit the spot, if, of course, one feels inclined to revisit such an overly familiar Dickens’ tale. Necessarily, it’s the least psychological film to bear the name Polanski and it’s tempting to read the director’s less than obvious choice of material as a move to further his slow reacceptance back into polite society, following his Oscar win for The Pianist and successful legal spat with Vanity Fair. Sure enough, Paris’ most notable refugee claims to have made Oliver Twist so his two children might see his work and frankly, if it prevents his young offspring facing the trauma of Repulsion or asking, ‘Daddy, who’s that lady?’ during The Fearless Vampire Killers, then it’s a lavish $60 million budget well spent.
It’s still an unlikely coupling – Polanski, an auteur rooted in paranoia and hardcore interiority, and Dickens, the creator of brilliant, yet slender social stereotypes - but for the first 80 minutes, their mutual flair for grotesquery serves the film admirably. Polanski delights in the squalid details of 1830s England in a manner that recalls Bart Simpson’s chimney-sweep impersonations or The League Of Gentlemen. He mines the spectacles of Darwinian street brawls, ginger tarts, pilfering ragamuffins and Birmingham accents for the same camp comic horror that characterised The Ninth Gate, ably assisted by an entire harem of great character actors.
Unfortunately, once the narrative and titular milksop foundling move away from Sir Ben Kingsley’s brilliantly gnarled Fagin and the London underworld into the auspices of the gentry, they never recover. The final scenes are curiously lacking in drama of any sort, like being ineffectually smacked by a particularly velvety glove. Bitter Moon this is not, but it’s a far, far better thing than Oliver & Company.