Director: Roman Polanski, PG, 2005
Stars: Ben Kingsley, Barney Clark, Jamie Foreman
Out to buy on DVD
If you believe the interview on the DVD extras, Polanski decided on this unlikely remake purely because he wanted to make a fairytale for his children. Yet the film does double duty as a companion piece to the director’s The Pianist, since the experiences of Dickens’s errant orphan (Clark) echo Polanski’s own in the aftermath of the Second World War.
The writer Ronald Harwood’s adaptation plays the story remarkably straight, excising several of Dickens’s more unlikely coincidences to give the tale a harder edge that finds its balance in Kingsley’s surprisingly likeable Fagin. Eminently watchable, though it lacks the charm of David Lean’s 1948 film.
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DVD extras
Interview with the director, documentaries on the casting and screenplay, Clark’s diary
NIGEL KENDALL