THIS made-in-Oz generic hybrid combines documentary, delivering facts that may or may not take sides, with narrative, entertaining the film-goer with or without message.

Joint writer/directors Helen Gaynor and Alan Rosenthal’s film tells the story of Isaac “Ikey” Solomon, reputed to have inspired Charles Dickens to embody him as the epitome of wickedness as Fagin in “Oliver Twist”. Contrasting with the genteel images of late 18th and early 19th centuries Britain fictionalised by lady novelists, its social environment presents robust realities of social and justice systems considered appalling by 21st century standards. Its geographical environment moves between London’s Spitalfields and the penal colony in Tasmania. And it does these things with style, content and verity levels respectful of both its genres.

The film offers satisfaction flavoured with mild didacticism to filmgoers interested primarily in its story content, no less than ones prepared to invest intellectual energy in it.

Ryk Goddard plays Ikey with restraint, suggesting that Dickens did the opposite when creating Fagin. As stoic wife Ann, who bore Ikey’s children and got seriously fitted up by the cops when Ikey escaped and fled to America, Carrie McLean subdues emotional range as perhaps befits a woman whom history bypassed because history was unaware of her place in it.

In short, the film offers unexpected values and invites attention simply for that reason.

At Capitol 6