Twelve episodes again for this super-classic story, twelve stations on this way of the cross. That gives the director the time he needs to get down to details since he has three times more time than a normal film director. To see the twelve episodes in one go is also a great privilege because each episode is fresh in your memory when you move to the next. This dramatic suspense is essential in this story if you want to enjoy the social Deus Ex Machina used by Charles Dickens to make a bleak and sinister story into a fairy tale.
The story is, at the time of Charles Dickens, about the monstrous social system and its social over-exploitation of orphans and the poor. It is the practice of municipal workhouses in which the poor and orphans are enslaved into doing simple tasks that are profitable for the businessmen for whom they are performed. Dying in that environment is a liberation.
On the other hand, if you manage to evade that over-exploitation, you can find your freedom in the enterprising life of thieves organized in bands that are real businesses. The end will unavoidably be death by hanging, or if you are lucky forced labor in some distant colony, but you will have enjoyed your freedom during your short career as a thief.
Dickens though always has another objective. After describing the worst social conditions possible in Victorian England, he manages to salvage his main characters, here two orphans, with some kind of artificial confession, birth certificates, medallions, etc., that provides these orphans with a pedigree that has no reason to blush or shrink away in front of the decent society of Queen Victoria who requires you to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth.
This particular adaptation by the BBC does not frustrate your expectations that were great at the beginning. The villains are real villains. The do-gooders are real selfless souls, the values of society are enhanced and advocated as best. The chief-thief is de-semitized and reduced to what he is a thief leading children into crime. And the children are marvelously well directed. Oliver Twist is a darling that manages some rather cold and distant attitude in situations that would have made many more cry like wimps.
Jacques COULARDEAU
The story is, at the time of Charles Dickens, about the monstrous social system and its social over-exploitation of orphans and the poor. It is the practice of municipal workhouses in which the poor and orphans are enslaved into doing simple tasks that are profitable for the businessmen for whom they are performed. Dying in that environment is a liberation.
On the other hand, if you manage to evade that over-exploitation, you can find your freedom in the enterprising life of thieves organized in bands that are real businesses. The end will unavoidably be death by hanging, or if you are lucky forced labor in some distant colony, but you will have enjoyed your freedom during your short career as a thief.
Dickens though always has another objective. After describing the worst social conditions possible in Victorian England, he manages to salvage his main characters, here two orphans, with some kind of artificial confession, birth certificates, medallions, etc., that provides these orphans with a pedigree that has no reason to blush or shrink away in front of the decent society of Queen Victoria who requires you to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth.
This particular adaptation by the BBC does not frustrate your expectations that were great at the beginning. The villains are real villains. The do-gooders are real selfless souls, the values of society are enhanced and advocated as best. The chief-thief is de-semitized and reduced to what he is a thief leading children into crime. And the children are marvelously well directed. Oliver Twist is a darling that manages some rather cold and distant attitude in situations that would have made many more cry like wimps.
Jacques COULARDEAU