'Pianist' team puts its own twist on the newest 'Oliver'

Charles Dickens' powerful 1839 novel of social injustice, "Oliver Twist," has been made into more than a dozen major movies since 1909 and virtually all of them have worked -- even Disney's 1988 animated, all-animal version, "Oliver and Company."

MOVIE REVIEW

OLIVER TWIST

DIRECTOR: Roman Polanski

CAST: Barney Clark, Ben Kingsley,Jamie Foreman

RUNNING TIME: 128 minutes

RATING: PG-13 for disturbing images

GRADE: B

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Most famously, it was filmed by David Lean in a 1948 British version with John Howard Davies as Oliver and Alec Guinness as Fagin that is frequently cited by critics as one of the cinema's greatest adaptations of a classic of English literature.

And lightning struck twice in the same place 20 years later, when Carol Reed's film version of the Broadway musical, "Oliver!," became the biggest box-office hit of 1968 and won a whole pile of Oscars, including best film and best director.

The story also works for the "Pianist" team of director Roman Polanski and playwright Ronald Harwood, even if their earnest, eye-filling, perfectly respectable adaptation does not really hit the emotional or cinematic heights of its two best predecessors.

The familiar title character is, of course, a 9-year-old orphan (Barney Clark) who exchanges the abuse of a provincial workhouse for the streets of London, where he falls in with a gang of boy thieves led by Fagin (Ben Kingsley), a rascally caricature of an aged Jew.

On the way to a happy ending, he's trained as a pickpocket, chased by a vigilante mob, adopted by a kind gentleman (Edward Hardwicke), kidnapped from his new home, forced into a burglary, and shot by one of literature's most dastardly villains, Bill Sykes (Jamie Forman).

The most drastic of several liberties the film takes with the novel (and other film versions) is to completely delete the subplot of Oliver's mother and the matter of his parentage, which gives the tale a fairy-tale quality and the Lean film its legendary opening scene.

In general, Harwood's script tends to tone down the Dickensian eccentricity of the characters, and it's careful to linger on a PC-inspired coda that humanizes and gives some sympathy to Fagin, a part that in the past often has provoked charges of anti-Semitism.

The movie is 23 minutes longer than the Lean version, yet it somehow seems much less evocative of the novel's immense scope and texture. And its Cockney accents are such a strain to understand that as much as a third of the dialogue is indecipherable.

Still, 11-year-old Clark has the face of an angel, Kingsley gives Fagin his all, Leanne Rowe is especially heartbreaking as Oliver's doomed protector, Nancy Sykes, and the film's portrait of an institutionally abusive society is appropriately chilling.

It's also the most pictorially beautiful of the "Oliver" movies. Shot in Prague (at a cost of $60 million), using a gigantic outdoor set of the early-Victorian East End (and apparently very little CGI), Polanski has given the Dickens saga a thrilling epic look.

It's also clear that the director, who had a harrowing, Oliver-like childhood of his own during WWII, has put more of himself into the story than Lean or Reed. His film has a harder edge, a more personal feel and a much more melancholy and qualified happy ending.

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