Forgiveness in Polansky's newer OLIVER TWIST

[EarlyActs]

Two figures die as 'necessities' of justice in Dickens' OLIVER TWIST. Bill Sykes, a criminal strongman, accidentally hangs himself trying to escape justice. Fagin, under Sykes in their network, is hung as a criminal operating a system of child pick-pockets.

Polanski's treatment makes a strong case about 'forgiving the thief on the cross' when a very late scene has Oliver earnest to visit Fagin the day of his execution, and to forgive him for how Fagin used Oliver. It is the full arc of Oliver's character which makes him shine in the whole story, but it didn't have any theological embellishment like it could have.

 

[John Bauer]

Oliver Twist works with Victorian moral sentiment and social critique, not a biblical soteriology. The deaths of Fagin and Sikes function as narrative justice within a moralistic framework: (a) evil consumes itself; (b) vice leads to ruin. Dickens is not making any claim analogous to the cruciform economy of forgiveness in Luke 23. If you import thief-on-the-cross language into Dickens, you end up creating parallels that Dickens neither intended nor built the story to sustain.

Edited to add: Roman Polanski, who adapted Oliver Twist in 2005, softens Dickens a little: Oliver is gentler, Fagin is more pathetic than villainous, and a late jail visit lets Oliver offer human compassion. It is emotional humanism. No repentance. No Christ-figure. No “thief on the cross” parallel. Nothing in Dickens requires Polanski’s interpretive angle, and nothing in Polanski’s angle bears any theological weight, which makes this “thief on the cross” comparison even stranger.