Twist

If one starts off with an exemplary textual source there is a fair chance that one can produce a good film but this re-working of Charles Dickens' 'Oliver Twist' unfortunately is not one such. Taking Oliver off the streets of Victorian London and dropping him into present day Toronto, where he falls in with a cabal of rent boys and drug addicts, is not in itself a bad idea but writer/director Tierney fails to realize that, aside from Dickens' evocative writing, it is the spirit of the original that makes it work.

David Lean's classic screen transposition of the novel of course comes to mind as having everything that this does not - memorable characterisations, superb visual style and effective dramatisation. Tierney's version fails to re-invigorate Dickens' story which was concerned with the abuse of children in his day and which here ends up being more of an artificial constraint on his subject than an asset, remaining at best a conceit signalled by the preservation of the original's names and narrative functions but never coming alive within Tierney's re-contextualisation of the story (Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, 1991, itself based on an august literary source, comes to mind as a more effective treatment of similar subject matter).

The result is dramatically flat with a lugubrious pace eked along by maudlin singer-songwriter songs that only serve to alienate one further from Tierney's ultimately misguided endeavour.

 

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