![]() ![]() Fagin is a Jew in the Dickens novel, an anti-Semitic caricature (although to be sure the Christians in the novel are also named by religion and are seen for the most part as hypocrites, sadists and fools). David Copperfield asks at the beginning of his story "whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else." He is writing, of course, after its events have all taken place, and still does not know the answer.īecause the adult characters possess the power and make the decisions, it's particularly interesting to see what Polanski does with the key character in "Oliver Twist," who is Fagin ( Ben Kingsley), the grotesque old man who rules a household of pickpockets. The story, like many of Dickens' stories, centers on a young person who is thrown into a stormy sea of vividly-seen adult characters, and is often entirely in the dark about his own history and prospects. With his father in debtor's prison, he was sent at 12 to work in a boot-blacking factory not unlike the workhouse where Oliver briefly lands he asks in his memoirs "how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age." That Oliver, Dickens and Polanski all survived to find prosperity and success could not erase the early pain, and in "Oliver Twist" Polanski approaches the material not as another one of those EngLit adaptations, but with a painful and particular focus. Now rotate the story another turn, and we find that Charles Dickens himself spent a similar childhood. In that sense, "Oliver Twist" more directly reflects his own experience than "The Pianist." In the black market economy of wartime Poland, he would have met or seen people like Fagin, Bill Sykes, Nancy and the Artful Dodger, resorting to thievery and prostitution to survive. Oliver is about 10 when he is taken into the world of Fagin and his young pickpockets, and Polanski was 10 in 1943, when his parents were removed by the Nazis from the Krakow ghetto and he was left on his own, moving from one temporary haven to another in the city and the countryside. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |