What’s important and what isn’t? It’s decisions along these lines—in life and art—that decide who and what we are, and so the resounding "meh" of indifference that has greeted Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist comes as the surest proof available that our film culture’s priorities are, frankly, fucked. Oliver Twist is an important movie (not Important—Jarhead looks to have that covered) stranded without a hook, and the dreadful irony is that the broadness of Polanski/ Dickens’s story is precisely what doomed it in the contemporary movie market: demographic-dependent distributors obviously didn’t have a clue who to slow underhand pitch this one towards. (Sony: “We don’t suck at our jobs — people just know the story too well!”) Too much a fussily made, Merchant Ivory period piece for the cool kids who won’t leave the house without assurance of something edgy from a Pitchforkmedia.com banner ad; too little emotional underlining and (in best Jon Lovitz Master Thespian voice) “Acting!” for the bourgeoisie snoots that needs constant reassurance they’re seeing officially sanctioned art; and too morbid for the littler ones, who are all busy having their eardrums statutorily raped by a Smashmouth/Eddie Murphy double-team from the latest Pixar abortion anyways.

What’s being missed, foremost, is filmmaking so vocationally firm, effaced to storytelling means, and soundstage atmospheric, it might very well have come from of one of those great expat expressionists, a William Dieterle or Rouben Mamoulian, circa 1940. Which is not, however, to say this Oliver Twistever feels less than Polanski (and more in line with the aforementioned in his ex-expat sensibilities than anyone’s cared to think about—who knows more about being unmoored than a holocaust survivor/ teen diddler?)—in fact the hero of this film is probably the most passive, reticent, and emotionally opaque title character in a major production since, well, The Pianist (the films share a screenwriter, Ronald Harwood). Newcomer Barney Clark’s Oliver Twist is a blank-faced saint and, well in line with the protagonists of Polanski’s last three features, trips and stumbles through his tale by acted-on accident — his famous request to “have some more” isn’t a manifestation of heroic rebellion, but the reward at the losing end of drawing lots. Also carried over is The Pianist’s (and Polanski’s) balance of grim drollery and out-and-out horror, documenting ever mounting inhumanities with a series of stark punchlines. There are moments of clenching drabness here—Bill Sykes trying to drown his hound in a greasy canal, a workhouse boy stomping back-and-forth at night, mad with hunger. It’s the kind of stuff that demands those of us who did, to demand of those who didn’t: hold the complaints that Polanski’s disappeared behind his production values, and just pay attention to the movie.

The film’s opening announces its aesthetic conceit: a woodcut engraving of the countryside overlaps into a photographed image. So many of Oliver Twist’s frames seem like they might be modeled after storybook pages, but the movie breathes too much to play like a fastidious reproduction; Polanski and his cinematographer Pawel Edelman (another Pianist carry-over, who’s developed a full, rich palette of grays and browns) seem to be freshly cutting their own Illustrated Classic Edition—though probably George Cruikshank’s glum Oliver plates or the complete William Hogarth were on-hand in the art department. Location shots in Prague fill in for East London, feeling not too far removed from the Warsaw ghetto in The Pianist, or just about any of the more medieval vistas in The Ninth Gate—Polanski’s a filmmaker whose existence (literal and figurative) would be unthinkable without the remnants of cobbled, claustrophobic streets and twisty corridored houses of old Europe; it’s no accident that Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant could have easily used the same apartment building. The woodcuts which bookend the film only signal that yes, we’re in the hands of a filmmaker allied to another time, another way of thinking about movies, and a frame of reference that, far from being stodgily “classical,” shows a profound understanding of congestion and suffering as well as the ecstasy of open air.

If Polanski’s Twist can be faulted for anything, it’s perhaps in presenting a version of the novel that feels ever so slightly abridged. Dickens’s work runs between 500 and 600 pages, depending on the edition, which is reasonable enough for a 125-minute feature, but the richness of character and place that Polanski conjures makes his hero’s most famous line an honest question as the film dissolves back into the lovely engravings from whence it came. The hopping and skipping that moves the narrative quickly through the series of unfortunate events that befall Oliver before he finds his way to London feel appropriate as foreshortening measures—the filmmaker’s rendering exposition as just that, settling briefly enough to sketch a locale and supporting character (and only a filmmaker of Polanski’s stature can pull off this kind of synecdochic work with such confident aplomb), moving on in time enough that there’s plenty of room for the real meat of the text—but at a certain point it might have been worthwhile to rest for a bit in a setting so carefully recreated yet never observed with a fetishistic glance. Oliver Twist’s tactile historicity is borne of dull old virtues like attention to detail and the desire for fidelity—small wonder it’s tanked in an era when indie rock soundtracks and simpering quirk are the imitation-of-art stock-in-trade.

If we can assume proportionality important, Polanski’s “meat” would seem to be Oliver’s introduction into the world of Fagin (Ben Kingsley, in a fantastic turn that Geoffrey Rush would have slobbered his way into negation). It’s here where it most seems the film could have used to stretch out a little bit, but it merely continues on apace through an ever accruing series of happenings—almost relentlessly. Perhaps it’s part of Polanski’s strategy—Leanne Rowe’s Nancy refers to Fagin as “the devil,” but it’d be a hard case to prove based on the kinds of evidence with which we’re provided. Batty, thieving, mildly malicious, yes, but he never quite hits the level of evil Bill Sykes embodies (as per Dickens there’s a twinge of pathos in Sykes’s pathology, but here much of that rests on the feeling that his evils are over-emphasized for the good of Fagin). And even though Oliver ends up in an ostensibly happy life with the kindly Mr. Brownlow, there’s more than a hint of regret on his face as he rides away from death row, the site of his last visit with his old protector. Small wonder—the nearest thing to actual glee that the movie displays, between the frigid goodness at the Brownlow estate and the death-camp workhouse—are some moments with the bent, doddering fence, who teaches his charge a master class in skullduggery, replete with a pickpocketing lesson as clean and practiced as a soft-shoe.

Unlike The Pianist, where Adrien Brody’s Wladyslaw Szpilman is shuffled through an increasingly shrunken procession of habitats, Oliver’s journey is almost a bee-line for the good life, with appropriate bumps that never fully threaten derailment. This is Dickens’s turf (why, of course Charles Darnay happens to have an exact doppelganger in Sydney Carton!), Polanski’s just living in it, and Twist gives off a waft of relief and release after the ever-coiling spring that was The Pianist, almost as if the filmmaker enjoyed letting go a bit—Dickens has our ears, but Polanski’s stepped in to lend an eye. It was no less an artist than Sergei Eisenstein who proclaimed that Dickens’s handling of detail was essentially cinematic in quality, so it’s easy to see where Polanski, a filmmaker so clearly of another generation, so concerned with craft, translation, and truthfulness, might have had a difficult time focusing emphasis in the face of such a canonical literary text. For his failures and successes, we should be all the more grateful that a master (yes) like Polanski’s still working—and hard—at making things that resemble, well, movies, even if only a few of us are paying attention. Call this stuff “sturdy” if you like, but when the opposing team of “movies in the now” all-stars features Miranda July, Mike Mills, et al. trafficking in flimsy whimsy, we’ll take Roman, and all the associated baggage (which, if he keeps on at this rate, should be moot by 2008), any day.

I challenge anyone to think of another movie less relevant to the way we live now than Roman Polanski’s latest, Oliver Twist, the work of a director who apparently has nothing left to say about the contemporary world. Following a decade of “interesting” failures like Bitter Moon or Death and the Maiden (not to mention flat-out bad movies like The Ninth Gate), it’s time to admit that Polanski’s best films are a quarter century behind him. The Pianist, for which he was awarded both the Palme d’Or and the Best Director Oscar, was egregiously overrated; released in an atmosphere where any harsh criticism would have been interpreted as blasphemy, detractors of that conventional film (the story of a person whose inaction is meant to inspire us through the lame old jazz about the redeeming qualities of art) probably felt the same way I did: guilty, suspicious, and then guilty about that suspicion. I would’ve rather they finally released Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Cried.

As was proven in Alfonso Cuarón’s beautiful and flawed Great Expectations, Kenneth Branagh and Michael Almereyda’s ambitious adaptations of Hamlet, and even in Baz Luhrmann’s flashy, chaotic, and terrible Romeo + Juliet, a filmmaker with an original vision can reinterpret a master’s work and breathe new poetry into it, to make it alive with passion. Polanski so slavishly adheres to the Dickens novel, injecting so little imagination and artistry, that it sometimes feels like the performance of your local high school drama club. Despite the magisterial production values, the film lies lifeless as though still on the page. Even when I read Oliver Twist as a child and watched previous movie versions I was never so struck, as I was with Polanski’s adaptation, by how dull a protagonist Oliver Twist himself is. Dickens wrote that the intention of the story is to show “the principle of Good surviving through every adverse circumstance and triumphing at last.” Yet Oliver remains a passive catalyst rather than an active participant, simply whimpering, crying, fainting, and eating, and young actor Barney Clark is an angel-faced bore. Like Roald Dahl’s Charlie Bucket, Oliver is a young, impoverished, innocent Brit surrounded by cruel and unforgiving souls, yet in Tim Burton’s recent adaptation Freddie Highmore’s eyes gleam not with mere childish optimism, but dreams, hopes, enchantment, desires. Polanski’s Oliver Twist is merely an anonymous good boy.

Though Dickens was somewhat of a caricaturist, Polanski has gone too far, instructing his actors to perform in a ham-fisted, cartoonish manner. Polanski, who sought out Oliver Twist in the hopes of making a film for children, has turned it into overexaggerated flim flam. Fagin (commonly referred to in Dickens’s novel as “The Jew”) has been stripped of ethnicity yet still embodies the Jewish stereotype with his hooked nose, avarice nature, and corruption of youth. Ben Kingsley’s performance is a dreadful, hunchbacked embarrassment, brutally unfunny in the earlier scenes where he entertains his pickpocket assistants and later in the film, not particularly tragic. Jamie Foreman (looking like a cockney Jack Black) plays devious, cruel villain Bill Sykes as a dumb brute. He lacks any of the threatening violence that makes the character so terrifying in Dickens’s novel.

Not all of Polanski’s actors are molested here, though. Alun Armstrong’s brief, marvelous appearance as the cynical, short-tempered Magistrate Fang is all arched eyebrows, impatience, and snotty hilarity. The true revelation is Leanne Rowe, playing Nancy as a bawdy, saucy wench of the underworld who suddenly realizes her worth and refuses to be a pawn in the crimes of the vile men who surround her, a subtle performance in a sea of theatrical histrionics. And there is only one moment in the film that I found truly inspired, clever, and hilarious. After he is wrongly accused of stealing, Oliver is chased down a London street by an angry mob as a group of children watches a Punch and Judy show. Every child except one chases after Oliver when they hear the chaos. The camera places its attention on this one child, who briefly looks to his left, ignores the havoc, and then continues watching the puppet show, oblivious.

From the opening frames Polanski goes through the motions of the stale Masterpiece Theatre adaptation style of filmmaking—you’d naturally expect to find this film on PBS or A&E and then flip to something more interesting. This is decorative, Oscar-bait entertainment at its worst: Rachel Portman’s score is the same old disinterested, classical-inspired drivel, and so many of the film’s scenes, classics of British literature and pop culture, are dramatized with utterly no vitality. Oliver, a symbol of the oppressiveness and brutality of Victorian child labor is in this adaptation merely a sad-eyed innocent whose innocence grows tiresome. He has no nerve, no grit. Polanski makes no attempt to interject the story with outrage, and rather just impersonates the folksy moral irony of Dickens’s narration. While watching I wished the film had been transplanted to contemporary sweatshop Asia and injected with some serious social relevance, some life, yet Polanski has created a tired mimicry, a sad replica, of Dickens’s novel more suited to an elementary school diorama competition. Oliver Twist is certain to become a must-see for every high school English student too lazy to read the book.