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November 29, 2005
Please Sir, I Want Some Less.
The opening credits of Polanski's new Oliver Twist appear over what appears to be a monochrome engraving. Slowly, the illustration fades into colour...and in a certain sense it's downhill from then on. The best reason to see this film is to confirm to oneself how magnificent David Lean's 1948 adaptation was. Despite its (for the time) lavish production values, the Lean film was just that: it was sinew and gristle, soot and claustrophobia, cobblestone and bone. Here there is too much of the mind and the eye, too much air, too much well-fed flab.
Orphans forensically-styled with hair tousled to i-D photoshoot perfection, clear-faced except for the meticulously-applied cosmetic grime. London in every detail, too clean even (especially) where the dirt has been arranged with assiduous professionalism. We are "seeing London as it really was", with all the brash elision of the complexities of temporality and representation this phrase suggests! This London's hyperreality is flat and sterile, unlike Lean's expressionistic, glowering Piranesian labyrinth.
If Ben Kingsley's Fagin offers us a subtle and complex characterisation that far surpasses Alec Guinness's somewhat one-dimensional '48 performance – retaining, even at the height of his criminal powers, steeped in his own lore, a weirdly solicitous fragility that reminds one most of all of George Cole's wonderful TV creation Arthur Daley – then equally the Mr Brownlow episode in well-to-do Pentonville suffers from the overhygienically-depicted East End that precedes it: in Lean, removed from crime and grime, Oliver awakes in an environment suffused with a gentle whiteness that sympathises with the old man's kindness, and one of the most touching segments of the film unfolds.
Colour will simply not brook such quintessentially Dickensian contrasts: as Lean said at the time of filming Dickens, "you have to have very strong photography, black shadows and brilliant highlights."
As for Oliver himself, Polanski is not to blame that in 2005, practically nowhere in the western world, never mind fresh out of acting school, could a casting director find a child with such ingenuous charm as John Howard Davies. But the uniformly well-fed child-model cast in this film is nothing short of disastrous.
And of course, there is music – of the desperately generic kind that producers must surely select out of a mutlimedia database these days; at least it would show a want of economy to have it re-composed each time - but, as if to confirm Mullins' and Pellet's thesis, there is most assuredly no ciné-musique here. We see everything, we hear everything, we understand, but we feel nothing.
No need to ask why the most successful is the last, rooftop scene, which is the most bleached-out into monochrome, the most expressionistic (Sykes' corpse swinging against the full moon) and (literally, or rather graphically) the darkest. What is all too easily lost in colour - and all the analogous accompanying postmodern forms of meticulously overdesigned hyperdetail - is that part of the image which one does not see. This is one respect in which the movies need to learn from painting: suggestion is all. Lean's film was abbreviated savagely in every way, but there where black and white could not allow everything to be shown, there lay its tremendous evocative potency. Let's listen again to what David Lynch has to say of black:
Black has depth. Itís like a little egress; you can go into it, and because it keeps on continuing to be dark, the mind kicks in, and a lot of things that are going on in there become manifest. And you start seeing what you're afraid of. You start seeing what you love, and it becomes like a dream
With Polanski, the narrative is followed faithfully, everything is clear to the point of obscenity, and consequently we lose our dream of Dickens' world. What is most striking is that one could easily have written all of this without seeing the film (even if, expecting nothing, one hopes, because it is Polanski); and this predictability itself, as an indictment of the imaginative bankruptcy of commercial film today, is quite continuous with the internal failings of the work itself. There was no less attention to detail, no less concentrated effort, in Lean's film; but it all went toward making the absences speak, rather than filling out every last airbrushed pixel. No matter if this vision was "really" that of Dickens; it is de facto a culturally-constituted reality that can't simply be passed by unless one has something equally potent to put in its place; a pale naturalism, a washed-out notion of reality, just won't do. What a relief as credits roll and we escape from hyperreality and fade back into lithographic monochrome.
Posted by robin at November 29, 2005 02:18 PM
Comments
I checked yesterday for showtimes in New York/LA and there are none-even though reviewed Sep. 25. I thought this was a bad sign, but I can see what the film is from what you've written. Definitely the opacity of music score; it's getting worse to see films in the theater than on video or DVD with what used to be reserved for 'Sensurround'. But especially if it's going to be a self-important film like this one there could not but be a 'soaring' type of score. It probably looks even more theme-parkish visually than the cheap ones who want it quite unself-consciously by now, since Polanski would not know how to actually 'want' such a visual look.
This talk of things 'needing' to be re-made or 'needing' to be revived I often hear, as if it were something so accepted one never questioned it. Rarely do remakes surpass the originals, I can think of only two off-hand: the 1958 colour version of the 'women's-movie' tear-jerker 'Imitation of Life' by Douglas Sirk is definitely of more cinematic interest than the 1934 one with Claudette Colbet; and Robert Mitchum is far closer to Chandler's Philip Marlowe than Bogart or Dick Powell had been, and this remake of 'Farewell, My Lovely' does not suffer by the introduction of colour even into a 'noir' film. Another surprise comes to mind; after three versions of 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses,' the 2003 mini-series with Deneuve, R. Everett, N. Kinski, and D. Darrieux finally gets the evil and lasciviousness of Laclos to bristle properly.
But there is something sickening about 're-making' movies that are close to perfect. Here is 'Oliver Twist' which couldn't be improved upon, so it's 'enhanced.' Judy Holliday's comic genius in 'Born Yesterday' did not need any further elaboration, but it got it. Would Polanski think that 'Chinatown,' probably his most brilliant film, 'needed' to be 're-made?' I don't believe it.
I looked up reviews of the new 'Oliver' and also of another current remake 'Pride and Prejudice.' Always a suspect venture, these reviews (in the NYTimes and the LATimes) seem to have been written drunk. The only thing I found out of interest in one review is that Oliver and Brownlow are not the same family, which is a peculiar and unnecessary omission (one reviewer even made a tacky play on Blanche Dubois's 'kindness of strangers'). Otherwise, in the 'Pride' reviews, there is no mention of the 1940 classic with Olivier and Garson, but there is a comparison between the current film and the 1995 mini-series with Colin Firth in one of them, which says that the new film would, more or less, compare favorably to the 1995 version if it could have been as lengthy. This is very like saying that the performance of an opera company would have been quite as good as an obviously better-sung one had the first singers had enough rehearsal time. Is not the general tendency in almost all culture product more opacity but less concentration?
Posted by: Dr. Mulli of 'le tout New-York' at November 29, 2005 05:01 PM
the whole idelogogical concept of 'enhancement' deserves a sustained critique...eg 'enhanced' DVDs which contain hours of 'features' which, rather than 'help you enjoy the film more' (whatever that means), impose an oppressive burden of trivia...
Posted by: robin at November 30, 2005 12:18 PM
btw I guess one advantage (at least for brits) is that this adaptation doesn't feature quite the level of chortling self-congratulatory rumbustiousness that BBC adaptations BY SACRED LAW have to feature (what, no Pauline Quirke???)
Posted by: robin at November 30, 2005 12:20 PM
I miss many fashionable names, never heard of Pauline Quirke till above comment. Then saw she played '2nd Whore' in 'The Elephant Man' last night when end credits started. Among other distinctions, appeared as 'Herself' in 2004 in British version of 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.'
Posted by: Dr. Mulli of 'le tout New-York' at December 1, 2005 11:50 PM
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Posted by: Mark Ford at December 13, 2005 01:34 PM