Star's Film Festival Diary for Monday, April 3rd

In Boy Called Twist, the young character gets his name from the bookshelf like everyone else in his desolate orphanage. (And if you think the first name, "Twist" is a difficult one to be saddled with, consider poor, young Gulliver and unfortunate little Middlemarch.) Aside from dropping the Christian name the Twist sported in the novel, the film is true to the original. (At least to the best of my recollection. If I were a good little Phillyist, I would have re-read Oliver Twist in the last week to better prepare for the film rather than Freakanomics. Apologies, in advance, if my memory gets some of the finer details wrong.) It's modern day Cape Town instead of Victorian London, Fagin's boys nick mobiles in lieu of pocket watches, but otherwise it's still the same cast of characters up to the same bits of no good, just shifted about a bit in time. I found this disappointing about Twist. I had hoped that in retelling the tale, writer/director Tim Greene would be adding something new and innovative. Instead I found it flat; the characters, with which I am so familiar, failed to spring to life for me in this film. Some of the story points were difficult to follow (for example, it was never made clear why Monks was so interested in the fate of the boy, but did not lift a finger to either help him nor hurt him), Nancy's maternal affection for Twist seems to come from nowhere, and although I know it's unfair to compare them, Bart Fouche as Bill Sikes is a gun-toting, Dannay-Bonaduce-looking, growling punk, but he's no Oliver Reed. It wasn't long before I found myself bored.

What is effective about the movie, and perhaps the reason that Greene made so few changes to the original story, is its grim believability. Greene portrays a hard life for the street kids in his Cape Town, a world in which money changed hands for Twist no fewer than four times (possibly more, I lost count); and several of those hands belonged to the officials society put in place to protect him. It's distressing to think that there are places in the world where Dickens' dismal cast of characters still fit right in. However, if it was Greene's intent to highlgiht the struggles faced by the kids whose lives make them vulnerable to the Fagins and Sikeses of the world, I really wish he had strayed from source material when it came to the ending. Ones hate to say that Twist, who suffered so much in such a short time, has a final fate that is too easily won; but the lesson one takes away from both he and the orphan for whom he is named is not "we must take better care of our children" but rather, "in the end, someone who can look after them, will." A nice thought if you're telling a fairy tale, but not so effective if you're making social commentary. My festival rating: Fair

Image via the DIY Walk of Fame at Boutell.com