Thus, Oliver is at the center of a melodramatic romance about the perils of existence, conceived not just as a day-to-day struggle but as the grand struggle, for the life of the soul. Oliver is not a likely little boy of his age or condition of any era; Fagin himself notes that Oliver "was not like other boys in the same circumstances." He's the embodiment of Dickens's hope that there is something inborn in humans that enables them to rise above the real social problems he saw around him and that he describes more than realistically, with thunderstruck, nightmarish emphasis. Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas, the Native Son of the ghettos that African-Americans were penned in, is also an allegorical figure, but since he serves as a warning of the depravity that his condition can lead to, he's a far more plausible figure than Oliver who represents a profession of faith on Dickens's part. Oliver Twist is a devout fantasy that blooms straight from the seedbed of allegory.

Polanski takes a story that is in essence a stark series of tableaux, featuring assorted virtues and vices in silhouette, so to speak, and gives it the naturalistic treatment--my boyfriend pointed out that he'd never noticed horse turds in the street in a period movie before. But that doesn't add nearly as much as Polanski seems to think because he's on auto-pilot with respect to the allegory. For instance, he gives Oliver a working-class accent, which defeats the greater point--Oliver's unlikely perfect speech in the book doesn't just foreshadow the class he properly belongs to but announces his essential worth.

Another problem is that the script (by playwright Ronald Harwood) is an even more slenderized version of the story than in Carol Reed's musical adaptation Oliver! (1968). Cutting back on the characters and subplots at least makes sense if you want to make room for musical numbers. And while the music-hall turns of Ron Moody as Fagin, Shani Wallis as Nancy, and Jack Wild as the Artful Dodger alter and soften the material (song-belters being friendlier companions than fences and whores and thieves), they also serve the material by bringing out the high artifice and energy in Dickens's style of characterization. Working with a skeletal plot, Polanski doesn't give us an Oliver Twist that is meaningfully truer to Dickens or truer to life, but one that plays like a version of Oliver! with all the songs cut out and nothing put in their place.

Nor does Polanski's naturalism recommend itself on its own terms. At one point Oliver is running from the police (though he's done nothing wrong) and is stopped with a blow to the mouth by a "great lubberly fellow." In the book the fellow touches his hat with a grin, "expecting something for his pains" while in the movie he sticks his hand out level, palm up, to receive a coin. This is just crude, but not in the way Dickens was, i.e., with much sharper irony. Polanski's Oliver Twist seeks to be as naturalistic as an illustration out of Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor and fails, but also lacks the stylization to put the allegory over with the theatrical punch Dickens brought to it. In this way Polanski falls far short of David Lean's 1948 version, which catches the book's shadowplay intensities perfectly. And because Lean understands it's not a "difficult" story he manages to get through more of the plot at a faster clip than Polanski, whisking you from one peak to another and another.