Powered by Google
Home
New This Week
Listings
8 days
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Art
Astrology
Books
Dance
Food
Hot links
Movies
Music
News + Features
Television
Theater
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Classifieds
Adult
Personals
Adult Personals
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Archives
Work for us
RSS
   

OLIVER TWIST

BY PETER KEOUGH
Stars graphics

130 MINUTES | OPERA HOUSE + PROVIDENCE PLACE 16 + SHOWCASE

Rehabilitated by his Oscar for The Pianist, Roman Polanski is now the kind of filmmaker who adapts classics — though in this case it’s not so much Dickens’s original as David Lean’s 1948 version, which he seems to be imitating, with variations. Instead of Lean’s expressionistic chiaroscuro, Polanski employs a palette of corroded greens and grays with occasional sunny glints of color to mirror Oliver’s turns of fortune. Oliver (Barney Clark) again is a "mealy" boy and the least interesting "literary character" in the story — Polanski even skips that quintessential Dickensian device, the mysterious parentage. Neither does Ben Kingsley’s Fagin make much of an impression; he’s more pitiful than diabolical, and in his toned-down Jewishness he seems less of a racial caricature but more of a cinematic cliché. Best are Jamie Foreman as Sykes and Mark Strong as his crony Toby Crackit, whose orange Harpo hair and inappropriate glee evoke the Polanski of old. Otherwise, this is too much Oliver, not enough Twist.


Issue Date: September 30 - October 6, 2005
Back to the Movies table of contents








home | feedback | masthead | about the phoenix | find the phoenix | advertising info | privacy policy | work for us

 © 2000 - 2007 Phoenix Media Communications Group