Directed by Roman Polanski. Starring Barney Clark and Ben Kingsley. Rated PG. For showtimes, please see page 71

Most literary adaptations attempt, in ways smart or callous or sensational (or even musical!), to pluck what can be easily exploited from something otherwise hard to summarize in easy tag lines and sexy star turns. Charles Dickens is in a class by himself, of course; his is an almost state-sanctioned form of depression, relieved by grotesquely subversive humour and seasoned with a harsh tang that's hard to obscure with trendy ingredients. Roman Polanski doesn't try to update or alter Oliver Twist, and that is this version's triumph, if also its limitation.

Polanski, working with The Pianist screenwriter Ronald Harwood, has fashioned a thoroughly faithful adaptation. It is nonetheless skewed through a distinctly eastern European sensibility, something deepened by the use of Prague (and its many soundstages) subbing for 19th- century London at its most dynamic and putrefied. Where we leap into the story, nine-year-old orphan Oliver (Barney Clark) is delivered to the workhouse, where he's expected to die in harness, "and not a minute too soon", as someone helpfully adds.

He is shipped out, however, and he then moves briskly through dead-end jobs until he hoofs it to the big city. There, he is immediately taken under the wings of the Artful Dodger (Harry Eden) and a strange man called Fagin (Ben Kingsley). Polanski and Harwood denude the master thief of the book's anti-Semitism but-by giving Kingsley the usual hook nose and foreign airs-not entirely of his stereotypical Jewishness. It's an odd choice for a director who spent his own childhood being chased by Nazis, but it's a livable one, I suppose.

In any case, the tale only rests for a while on the ambiguity of Oliver's relationship with Fagin, who is both half-mad benefactor and Cockney opportunist, as opposed to the pure noblesse oblige of the muttonchopped Mr. Brownlow (Edward Hardwicke). The film's final third shifts almost entirely to the manifold evil represented by Bill Sykes (Jamie Foreman), a bad thief but a fairly good murderer who casts a dangerous spell over our Oliver and a young prostitute called Nancy (cast standout Leanne Rowe) who attempts to step between Sykes and the lad.

But in the last 40 minutes or so, the lead's weakness, as written and played, begins to undermine this Twist's emotional pull. Although Clark definitely has the handsome, sensitive face on which several characters comment, there's not a lot of oomph there to justify the confidence. And anyway, he increasingly disappears from the story as Sykes takes over, which is something of a bitter irony, given that Dickens was pleading for readers to recognize the innate humanity of children at a time when they were little more than chattel.

Polanski has served up a very fine gruel indeed, but is it really so wrong for us to ask for more?