Sir Ben Kingsley must have had an epic inner battle not to caper about like Ron Moody

It is perhaps easy to see why Roman Polanski was attracted to adapting Oliver Twist for the cinema. At what must be near the end of his working life (he is 72), Polanski is clearly driven by the need to explain his complex and arresting life story. When he is not defending the right to truthful biography at the high court (he won a lawsuit against Vanity Fair this summer after it published a libellous profile), he is telling his own tale through his films.

Polanski spent his childhood in wartime Poland; its painful details were drawn forcefully in The Pianist (2002), which won him the Best Director Oscar. But Dickens's tale of the orphan Oliver Twist must have also been resonating in his mind. Polanski, born in Paris of Polish parents in 1933, moved to Krakow three years later. In 1941, when Roman was eight, his father was deported to Mauthausen labour camp in Austria (they were reunited after the war). His mother was sent to Auschwitz, and never returned.

Roman, in effect an orphan who had to be hidden away, was taken in by a succession of Polish families. His life was saved, but at what emotional cost? For at least the first half-hour of the film, we see Oliver being locked up, pushed away, hidden in coal bunkers, hit and spurned. Hugging is vital; or at least, when the hugs happen, they are crucial. It is a yearning testimony that small boys need love, and a family, from a director who may have lacked both.

Small boys also need light and shade. It is difficult for their stories to flourish otherwise; and Polanski says one of his purposes behind making the picture was to direct a film his children could watch. Yet, almost incredibly, this adaptation is too underplayed and lacks the emotional impact of the original. The keenest cinematic comparison is not to the David Lean version (1948), but to the Lionel Bart/ Carol Reed musical Oliver! (1968), whose memory hangs spectrally over the film. Even as you remember that the line of besmocked, bowl-clutching orphans will not chorus "All we ever get is gruuuuel!", Bart's music refuses to be banished. For all Polanski's perfectly orchestrated top shots, Bart's peerless combination of music hall, cockerney and cheese delivers a purer punch.

You miss Oliver Reed. You miss Ron Moody. Sir Ben Kingsley probably misses him, too. In the scene where Fagin teaches Oliver how to pick people's pockets, Kingsley must have had an epic inner battle not to launch into Moody's capering signature tune. Meanwhile, Nancy's fixation with the canophilist monster Bill Sikes is simply inexplicable without her soliloquy ("As Long As He Needs Me", etc) by the pub door. Lacking the emotional shorthand of the torch song, the whole murderous sub-plot is lacklustre. You just don't believe, sans Shani Wallis and her dropped consonants in a minor key, that Nancy is hooked on Bill. Furthermore, without the audience knowing that Nancy knows Oliver would go to Timbuktu (and back again) for her, you don't believe she is capable of loving him in the neo-maternal way that enables her to die for him.

Bart's Oliver! did not so much replace Dickens's Oliver Twist as perform the semi-miraculous feat of updating it while continuing to contain its sentimentality and sadness. Without either Dickens's prose or Bart's lyrics, Polanski leaves us with a cute child in a hat having a rather nasty time. Sometimes musicals just can't be beat.

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