Oliver Twist (2005)

Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist arrives as a respectable literary adaptation, filmed in Prague with a cast of British character actors and a nine-year-old who looks appropriately underfed. It is 2005, which places it after the cultural turn but before the era of the audience being instructed. The film has no interest in instruction. It wants to tell the story Dickens wrote, and it does so with competent gloom, candlelight, and mud. Ronald Harwood's screenplay trims the novel's tangles with a surgeon's calm, and the finished product was a commercial disappointment, which seems unfair to a film this tidy.

The poverty on display is genuine and Dickensian: child labor, workhouse gruel, a gang of boys trained to steal. None of it is framed as a critique of capital as such. Dickens was a reformer, not a theorist, and the film follows him. Nancy dies for love of a brute, and the film mourns her without turning her into a symbol of anything. Fagin, played by Ben Kingsley with a careful mix of menace and tenderness, remains a villain, not a case study.

The casting is a traditional British ensemble, the kind assembled by habit. There is no revision of the historical record, no environmental subtext, no interrogation of the body, the mind, or the gender order. The film offers old-fashioned moral storytelling, and it offers it without a single moment of sermonizing. Every category we are obliged to weigh comes back empty. The sommelier tastes, pauses, and sets the glass down. A well-made film about a miserable century, and nothing more. It is a pleasure to record a vintage this clean.