The best of Twists

Novelist John Irving claimed recently that Roman Polanski's film of Oliver Twist was "better than Dickens".

I wouldn't go that far. But on its British premiere last night it struck me as a version of Dickens's novel that ranks equally with David Lean's starkly emotive, black-and-white 1948 adaptation and Carol Reed and Lionel Bart's counter-intuitively, gloriously upbeat 1968 musical, Oliver!

Polanski streamlines but generally does not sanitise the orphan Oliver's story. Inviting inevitable comparisons with his own wartime childhood in the Cracow ghetto, he has cut away subplots and characters to concentrate on how awful it is to be a child, alone and poor.

The film often feels as if it's shot from a nine-year-old's perspective and is the more urgent and pacy for it. And when Polanski turns the camera around, the soulful, largely mute face of his remarkable young star, Barney Clark, speaks volumes.

The director shows a delicacy and sureness of touch that was long missing from his work, until The Pianist (and its three Oscars) announced his return to form in 2002. Polanski's handling of the character of Oliver's protector/exploiter Fagin is particularly adroit.

Although Ben Kingsley looks and sounds much like Dickens's original racist caricature of a Jewish miser, Fagin's race is never alluded to here and he is a warmly sympathetic character compared with the workhouse officials or Jamie Foreman's psychotic Bill Sykes. This strikes me as an admirable way of neither airbrushing out nor apologising for a literary genius's most offensive attitudes.

Of course these days a certain prettification is necessary, even for a film largely financed, and shot, in Europe. Leanne Rowe's affecting Nancy and Harry Eden's charmingly cocky Artful Dodger both have strangely clean hair, teeth and skin, and the characters of Oliver's rich saviours are sketches of sweetness.

But these are quibbles. This Oliver Twist may not be better than Dickens, but it's level pegging with the best earlier adaptations, and up there with Polanski's own best work. High enough praise, I think.

Oliver Twist opens on 7 October.