Seven Oaks Magazine.

Legendary filmmaker Roman Polanski has always been a great defender and practitioner of children’s rights; specifically, he has championed the child’s undeniable right to Roman Polanski. But if one can get past the reprehensibility of the man himself to take in his retelling of Oliver Twist – no easy task, particularly as a Russ Meyers-like fixation on the cleavage of the buxom actress who plays Nancy (Leanne Rowe) turns Dickens into a tale of two titties every time she’s on screen, reminding one of the sleazy predator behind the camera – one finds a stark, stunning and brilliant exploration of an indispensable piece of socially-engaged literature.

This isn’t, of course, the first time that Dickens’s story of an orphan’s gruel and unusual punishment has been told on the big screen. But if Carol Reed’s paradoxically cheery musical, Oliver! (1968) was Adam West’s campy, 1960s Batman, then Polanski is the franchise’s Tim Burton: Returning the story to its original darkness and terror. Polanski’s imagining is a relentless, harrowing story of merciless exploitation, murder, abuse, and the sundry horrors of Victorian capitalism. In a political climate wherein the (alleged) party of the British working class has become the chief architect of the dismantlement of the social infrastructure that once separated modern conditions of life and work from their 19th century antecedents, the story of Oliver Twist is a valuable contribution to an otherwise limited debate in the public sphere.

The outlines of the story are, by now, iconographic: A small orphan with angelic features, Oliver Twist (Barney Clark), is shunted from parish to workhouse to indentured labour, from which he escapes to the city of London. There he is taken in by an avaricious fence called Fagin (played transcendently by a sublime and unrecognizable Ben Kingsley) and joins the coterie of young thieves who do his bidding. Captured by police after being wrongfully accused of a theft, Oliver is taken in by a wealthy, charitable man, only to be kidnapped by Fagin’s sociopathic associate, Bill Sykes (Jamie Foreman).

Dickens’s tale is, by all accounts, a milestone in anti-capitalist literature. With the possible exception of Bill Sykes’s malevolence, the characters’ criminality is largely contextualized in the desperation produced by class society; we root for Oliver’s benefactor to rescue him precisely because the primacy of Nurture over Nature in shaping the individual’s life and behaviour has been established so forcefully.

Polanski recreates Victorian London with the skill of a master filmmaker. Saturated with grime, filth, violence, as well as the balletic chaos of human movement and the throb of the crowd, the city is a desperate, lonely, crushing and unforgiving place.

A return to Dickens – who explored the terrifying inequities and brutalities of a class-divided metropolis at the centre of an Empire bent on exporting its ‘civilization’ to the rest of the world – can only be constructive in times such as these. In Western Canada, newly-relaxed child labour legislation has already resulted in at least one death, as the market forces that have plunged the global South into the routinized exploitation of children just begin to come to bear on the wealthy, industrialized countries that put them into place. A collective reflection on the history of the savage treatment meted out to children wherever the rights of capital are unrestrained is certainly in order, and Polanski – of all people – has made a worthwhile and important contribution to that reflection.