So I’d read Oliver Twist quite a few years ago and sometime in high school had also watched Polanski’s adaptation of it (which I realized around 20 minutes into the class movie screening- go figure!). Neither of them helped me better decipher Fagin’s character, though, and in a moment I’ll explain why.
Now see, when I’d first pictured Fagin, I painted him as a scraggly, dirty, evil old man. Well yes, he did offer Oliver home and shelter, undoubtedly the best the boy had had so far, but he was turning him into a thief! If that wasn’t enough, he was taking advantage of Oliver’s innocence, and all the kids he was “taking care of,” by poisoning their minds, and all for his own good (pun intended, ref. hidden jewel box.) He seemed exactly like the kind of scary stranger my parents scared me about as a kid: “Don’t go off wandering alone in the streets; someone will kidnap you and turn you into a beggar or a prostitute!” Dickens might have said he’s a Jew, and like the Dailymail article says, he might have based the character off of a 60 year old black child stealing gang-leader, but his character was so formidable that even without understanding the prejudice against Jews (or what a Jew was, for that matter) I was terrified of him. His niceness was obviously a pretense.
And then came Polanski’s version of Fagin played by Ben Kingsley and this man seemed quite…likeable. He might be into a bad business, he might be corrupting kids, but he was well meaning. He was kind, fun, and protective- a good guardian to sum it up, and Oliver’s attachment to him was completely understandable. Did we read Dickens wrong? Was Fagin actually secretly a human with a heart that we’d failed to see out of fear? Did Polanski manage to show us the soft side of Fagin that was obviously there? I’m not sure.
Kingsley’s Fagin was certainly not the formidable beast I’d imagined, and he convinced enough of Fagin’s good side that it changed the way I was reading his character in the book itself, in the later chapters. Will Eisner, authot of Graphic novel “Fagin the Jew” might have felt the same.; see pictures below:
Eisner’s Fagin: More Hagrid than Filch or Voldemort
from culturemass.com
Eisner gives Fagin a Past
from allstarcomicart.com