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'Angela's Ashes' stays true to book, but too much misery is not good company
Friday, January 21, 2000
By WILLIAM ARNOLD
In the opening moments of the film version of "Angela's Ashes," Frank McCourt's 1997 Pulitzer prize-winning memoir of his harsh Irish upbringing, the narrator warns us this is going to be a story of the most "miserable childhood" imaginable.
For the next 2-1/2 hours, it continually one-ups itself in misery: It wallows in abuse and ignorance and abject poverty without offering a single redeeming supporting character. It's the first film I know of in which we get to see all five of the top-billed actors vomit.
So the movie, which was co-written and directed in an uncharacteristically sedate manner by Alan Parker ("Midnight Express," "Evita"), does deliver fidelity to its source, and McCourt's fans should relish it. But, for the rest of us, all this misery crammed into 145 minutes makes for one rough sit.
The story opens in 1935 Brooklyn, when, in an odd reversal of the normal American immigrant experience, the McCourt family has decided to return to Ireland, mostly because the father (Robert Carlyle) is a drunk who can't hold a job, even in the land of opportunity.
Angela's Ashes. Directed by Alan Parker. Screenplay by Laura Jones and Parker. Cast: Emily Watson, Robert Carlyle, Michael Legge, Ciaran Owens, Joe Breen. Universal/Paramount. "Angela's Ashes." Bella Bottega, Cinema 17, Crossroads, Factoria, Gateway Center, Grand Cinemas, Guild 45th, Meridian 16, Mountlake 9, Oak Tree, Parkway Plaza, Renton Village, Woodinville 12. 145 minutes. Rated R for language, sexual references and scenes of child abuse.
Grade: C+
Back in Limerick, they're taken in by the family matriarch and we follow the upbringing of the oldest son and narrator, Frank (played by three actors in various life stages) as his family moves from one traumatic experience to another over the years, and gradually disintegrates.
Angela (Emily Watson), the chain-smoking mother, can't stop having children, and they keep dying, one by one -- from sudden infant death syndrome, malnutrition, unsanitary conditions (the family lives, for much of the movie, next to an open community lavatory) and various ailments associated with the "dampness."
The father drinks up whatever money he earns, the mother ridicules the father with her constant reminders that he's utterly worthless, and the Catholic Church -- which holds supreme power in the community -- is unsympathetic, unhelpful and demeaning. Everyone in the movie is abusive, prejudiced and harrowingly ignorant.
It's a chronicle of bullying teachers and mean-spirited priests, of families reduced to begging and prostitution to survive, of overflowing chamber pots spilling on the floor and little naked children covered in flea bites or their own excrement when their mother can't get out of bed for weeks and their father is off on a binge.
What makes the movie unusual is it doesn't balance its misery with redeeming qualities or characters. It makes a half-hearted try in that direction in Frank's quest to escape to America, but it doesn't take. And there's no real humor, no visual poetry, no great performances or uplifting moments.
But it is a great lesson for anyone who thinks soul-devouring poverty is in any way ennobling, or that the earlier decades of the century were the "good old days." Like the book, the movie is likely to serve as effective therapy for Irish Catholics traumatized by their upbringing and others who can't get over their miserable childhoods.
But I felt brutalized by it. It ruined my day and I don't think I'm a better person for having seen it. I don't think it's dramatic art and I don't think it's probably any more accurate a portrayal of the universal Irish experience than its cinematic polar opposite: John Ford's "The Quiet Man."
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
MOVIE CRITIC
Of course, that's the point. People who love the book -- and there are legions of them because it's one of the publishing phenomena of the past decade -- love it precisely because it's so uncompromising in its quest to prove there's nothing as miserable as a miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
The McCourt parents (Robert Carlyle and Emily Watson) move their children from a miserable existence in Brooklyn back to an even more miserable existence in their home town of Limerick.
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