Dickens' London, re-created in Prague, is not otherworldly, and the nightmarish nature of Oliver's predicament is almost subliminally indicated. At the orphanage, he (Barney Clark) and the other boys sleep in coffin-esque cribs arrayed in grids that echo Auschwitz, but only mutedly. When he's dragged off to work for an undertaker, it's not quite a horror movie. His rescue by the raffish Artful Dodger (Harry Eden) and the still more ambiguously beneficial Fagin (Sir Ben Kingsley) is only slightly sinister, and his rescue indeed by kindly, stuffy muttonchop-mustachioed Mr. Brownlow (Edward Hardwicke) isn't breathtakingly dramatic. In Polanski's universe, shit simply happens, good and bad.
Clark is putti-cute as Oliver (and in this telling he makes it on looks alone, no kinship with the rich). Jamie Foreman growls generically as a Bill Sykes way more menacing than his mean dog; Lean did a better job complicating his character with hints of guilt, but Polanski's moral world is simple by design. Leanne Rowe shines as Nancy, Sykes' unwilling wench and Oliver's mother figure. Thanks to the unvarnished realism of the film's many capitalist über-pigs, you can't help noticing how much they resemble the Bush types who run America today—folks with Fagin's honesty, Sykes' compassionate conservatism, and the fairmindedness of Magistrate Fang.
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The big news in any Oliver Twist is not oppressed love muffin Oliver but Fagin. Kingsley doesn't ape the famous original George Cruikshank illustrations as Alec Guinness did. He's squintier, more insinuating, less Jewish-cartoonish. For all the picturesquely decayed snaggleteeth and scragglebeard and raggy clothes, the key to the character is in the only thing you can recognize as Kingsley's: those dark, banked-fire eyes. In Betrayal, he managed to make his cuckolded-husband character the bad guy, largely by turning those eyes into obliterating beacons of cruelty. Here, he uses them more variously, to convey twinkling joie de vivre, Fezziwiggian beneficence, corpse-cold calculation, animal panic. In a startlingly unemotional story, most of the emotions are contained behind Fagin's furry overhanging eyebrows.
The most interesting and revealing thing about Polanski's otherwise rather impersonal Oliver Twist is the ending. Oliver does escape the gang, the thugs of the underworld, and the establishment, but Polanski refuses to make the ostensibly upbeat ending happy. More than Lean, more than Dickens, Polanski respects the legacy of bloodshed even when it's overcome. (PG-13) TIM APPELO
Serenity
Opens Fri., Sept. 30, at Meridian and others
This sci-fi Western by Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, is a brainy valentine to fans of Firefly, the short-lived Fox show (available on DVD) on which it's based. There are several reasons the film probably won't do well at the box office: no big-name stars; too much story for a feature-length frame; and plot twists that will shock Firefly loyalists but may have little effect on nonfans. Still, there's enough smart-alecky dialogue and fun ensemble acting to entertain, if not convert, newcomers to Whedon's quirky vision of the future.
Though it's much smarter than The Island's derivative schlock, you could reduce Serenity to a pitch-meeting catchphrase: "Deadwood gets Lost in Space." A gaggle of tough-talking, gun-slinging space cowboys (and -girls) rocket through the 26th-century cosmos, pilfering cash from the sinister Alliance and sometimes swearing in Chinese. (Wanna know why? Ask a fan.) Led by Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), a cynical veteran of some kind of intergalactic civil war, the crew includes a dumb, brutish firebrand (Adam Baldwin), a geeky pilot (Alan Tudyk), a volatile psychic girl named River (Summer Glau), and River's earnest doctor brother (Sean Maher).
If this sounds like a collection of genre types, well, Whedon has long excelled at elevating such material to unexpected heights, mostly through sharp casting and a droll, high-minded approach to genres still widely dismissed as lowbrow. His well-paced script does a good job of introducing the crew; after that, it delves into the root cause of River's grisly nightmares and the efforts of a cold-blooded Alliance operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor) to find and destroy her. Confused neophytes may find solace in several witty fight scenes, a Whedon trademark, in which the jabs exchanged are alternately verbal and physical. And though Serenity is a bit too cerebral for its own good, that same quality lifts it above the vast majority of recent sci-fi flicks. (PG-13) NEAL SCHINDLER
