Tim Greene’s 2004 film Boy Called Twist feels like a mashup of Slumdog Millionaire‘s style and the content of Charles Dicken’s Oliver Twist–with a heavy reliance on the plot nuances of David Lean’s 1948 film Oliver Twist. The film both engages with these texts and makes statements of its own, with varying degrees of success.
Just as Dickens calls attention to the Poor Laws of his time, Tim Greene brings the modern mistreatment of children to the forefront of his film. The South African setting calls attention to child slave labor, an important problem in many parts of the world today. The beginning of the film focuses on the orphanage Twist grows up in. The woman in charge of the orphanage frowns upon the help getting attached to the children, because she knows not many of them will live for very long. She will inevitably sell those children who do live into slavery, just to make enough money to keep the orphanage afloat. This vicious cycle exhibits the system’s inherent, socially accepted corruption.
Once the narration shifts to the cityscape of Cape Town, Africa, Greene immerses us in the lives of Fagin’s gang of child thieves–something that neither Dickens nor Lean accomplish as well as Greene does. The audience witnesses the street kids’ solidarity through various scenes involving only the children. In both the novel and Lean’s adaptation, we witness most of this part of the narrative’s action through the perspective of Fagin or Oliver, and the street kids are more of an afterthought. In Boy Called Twist, however, we become part of their “strolling,” and their drug use and general debauchery alerts us as to how corrupted they really are. Fagin is living proof that children are not only bought and sold by the government; as he indicates, they must “earn their keep.”
Greene throws Twist in the midst of the street kids, blurring the lines between the black and white that Dickens and Lean clearly established. In both Dickens’ and Lean’s texts, Oliver is markedly innocent–almost impossibly so–and remains unchanged throughout the entirety of the texts. Greene, however, is more ambiguous about Twist’s innocence. Twist succumbs to peer pressure, taking drugs and aiding in the pickpocketing–which Oliver would never do. Though I understand the idea that no one is that innocent and could resist such peer pressure, Greene contradicts himself and suggests Twist’s innocence via other means. For example, anytime Twist is pictured either with Ebrahim Bassedien or in his house, he is dressed all in white. Furthermore, Greene refuses to let Twist die, saving him with a conveniently placed (and symbolically white) blanket. Frankly, Twist’s innocence felt a little hokey, at least in the world Greene created.
Note the difference between Twist on the street and Twist in Bassedien’s house.
Monks’ narrative also seemed to fall flat. Perhaps I couldn’t understand the–albeit limited–exchanges that involved Monks, or maybe I’m just missing something, but Monks seemed like an unnecessary character in this adaptation. He appears as a creepy stalker who haunts Twist’s childhood, driving by the orphanage what seems like every two seconds. I assume that Monks’ storyline is virtually the same as that in Lean’s adaptation, but I never received that clarification in Greene’s film.
Overall, Greene’s film brings to light some issues that relate Oliver Twist in a modern perspective. However, his reliance on the original text and David Lean’s adaptation sometimes hinders this initiative.
togreatacclaim 