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Scaring The Dickens Out Of Fagin

Kingsley's turn in Oliver Twist rewrites the image of the famous character.

Tom Tugend
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

ime-honored Jewish
stereotypes and caricatures
are falling on hard times in
the movies.
Al Pacino's complex and heart-
wrenching portrayal of Shylock
in The Merchant of Venice put a
human face on the vengeful
moneylender. In the German film
The Ninth Day, Judas is exalted
for enabling Jesus to fulfill his
divine mission.
Outside of The Passion, Mel
Gibson's controversial version of
the crucifixion of Jesus, Jewish
characters seem to be getting a
fair shake.
Now Ben Kingsley, in a new
movie version of Charles
Dickens' Oliver Twist, endows
Fagin, the trainer of young
thieves, with some redeeming
features.
The Fagin of the new movie is
not identified or depicted as a
Jew, a far cry from the "very old,
shriveled Jew, whose villainous-
looking and repulsive face was
obscured by a quantity of matted
hair:' created by Dickens nearly
170 years ago.
Director Roman Polanski fol-
lows the original story, with
some judicious editing.
Brought up in ahellish work-
house for the poor, orphan boy
Oliver Twist escapes his inden-
tured service with an undertaker
and is recruited by the Artful
Dodger into a ring of juvenile
thieves, exploited and mothered
by Fagin.
Other.members of the London
underworld circle are the brutal
robber Bill Sykes; his girlfriend
Nancy; Sykes' dog, which answers
to the same name as its master;
and the foppish burglar Toby
Crackit.
Oliver is rescued from a life of
crime by the kindly and prosper-
ous Mr. Brownlow, but is abduct-

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ed by Sykes, who fears the boy
will expose the gang to the
police.
Nancy tries to protect Oliver
but is killed by Sykes. In a dra-
matic standoff with police, the
evil-doers get their just desserts
and Oliver starts a new life with
his benefactor.

Back Story

The film has much going for it.
On a huge back lot in-Prague,
Polanski re-created an early 19th
century London that is breath-
taking in its crowded alleys, color
and misery, and unfolds like
paintings on a canvas by master
cinematographer Pawel
Edelman.
As Fagin, Kingsley's nose is
elongated and his posture
stooped, but he has shucked the
preposterous proboscis sported
by Alec Guinness in David Lean's
1948 version of the film, as well
as Ron Moody's nasal inflection
in the musical stage production
of Oliver.
Instead, Kingsley adopted an
east to southeast London dialect,
"not exactly cockney," which at
times defies understanding.
It's an impressive perform-
ance, never better than in softer
moments, when Fagin nurses the
wounded Oliver back to health.
It's interesting to speculate
whether the fact that Polanski
and screenwriter Ronald
Harwood (The Pianist) are
Jewish — while Kingsley has a
Jewish grandparent on his moth-
er's side — had a conscious or
subconscious effect in humaniz-
ing Fagin's character.
Harwood believes Polanski,
who survived the Holocaust in
the Krakow Ghetto and in hid-
ing, identifies with the lost child-
hood of Oliver, through whose
eyes the story unfolds.
"I have played Simon

Wiesenthal, Anne Frank's
father and Itzhak Stern in
Schindler's List:' said
Kingsley. "These films are
part of my consciousness,
and I am-passionately com-
mitted to reminding the
world of that great evil!'
Kingsley said he did not
set out to counter previous
Fagin stereotypes of unmit-
igated Jewish villainy, but
rather used two thespian
devices to get into the role.
One was to evoke the fig-
ure of a junk dealer
Kingsley knew as a 9-year-
old in Manchester, who
"had teeth like a horse,
green hands from handling
metal, a stooped walk, high-
pitched voice, and was
always wearing at least
three layers of overcoats."
The actor also created his
own "back story" for Fagin's
character, in which the
young Fagin was orphaned
early in life and raised by
his immigrant Russian Jewish
grandparents, who spoke no
English.
"My Fagin had to fend for
himself, lived on the streets and
decided to become the most
adept street kid he could:' the
actor said.

Evolution

From a historical perspective, the
Fagin created by Polanski and
Kingsley can perhaps be best
understood by considering the
evolution of Jewish portrayals in
films over the past 100 years.
In the silent-movie era, Jews,
along with Irish and blacks, gen-
erally were pictured as buffoons,
if not nasty moneylenders.
The 1920s featured love and
conflict among America's quaint
ethnic minorities, led by Abie's
Irish Rose.

Sir Ben Kingsley humanizes Fagin

in'Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist.

The first real talkie, The Jazz
Singer, had as its subtext the
conflict between being an
American and a Jew, a struggle
deeply felt but never admitted by
the immigrant Jews who founded
the movie industry.
The reflections raised in The
Jazz Singer did not evolve into
greater sensitivity, but rather the
exclusion of ethnicity, especially
Jewish characters, from screens
in the 1930s.
Jews reappeared tentatively in
World War II features, when the
melting pot bubbled with patri-
otism. The first post-war film to
confront American anti-
Semitism in some depth was
Gentleman's Agreement.
The breakthrough for Jewish
characters and overtly Jewish
actors came in the 1950s through
the 1970s, riding on three popu-
lar waves: The rise of the Jewish
novelists — such as Norman

Mailer, Philip Roth, Leon Uris or
Bernard Malamud — whose
bestsellers drew on their child-
hood experiences; the creation of
the State of Israel, which gave
Hollywood an updated
Frontiersmen vs. Indians theme;
and, most importantly, the rise of
the black, Latino and Jewish
identity movements, which made
ethnic differences not only
respectable but marketable.
Since then, the "Jewish" and
Holocaust film has become a
genre almost unto itself.
By the 1990s, a Hollywood
observer could -say, tongue in
cheek, that "in the old days, all
Jews had to be Americans. Now
all Americans have to be Jews!' it

Oliver Twist, rated PG-13,
opens Friday, Sept. 30, in
area theaters.

September 29 • 2005

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