ANGELA'S ASHES (Paramount) Starring: Emily Watson, Robert Carlyle, Michael Legge, Ciaran Owens, Joe Breen. Screenplay: Laura Jones and Alan Parker, based on the memoir by Frank McCourt. Producers: Scott Rudin, David Brown and Alan Parker. Director: Alan Parker. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, adult themes, brief nudity, sexual situations) Running Time: 145 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
I have not read the much-loved memoir by Frank McCourt on which ANGELA'S ASHES is based, but every indication is that the film re-creates McCourt's Limerick of the 1930s and 1940s magnificently. Cramped Roden Lane sits on the banks of an ersatz river of human waste and runoff from the incessant rains; children scamper through the streets in tattered clothing and bare feet; typhoid, fleas, consumption and conjunctivitis plague the young. It's a life of almost inhuman squalor, compounded by the effects of unemployment and alcoholism. It's the kind of life you might not believe existed if someone hadn't committed his life story to the page.
As a snapshot of existence in this particular time and place, Alan Parker's adaptation of ANGELA'S ASHES is exemplary. As a compelling story, it's not half as effective. The events begin in 1935, with Irish immigrants Malachy (Robert Carlyle) and Angela McCourt (Emily Watson) living in New York with their five children, including eldest son Frank (Joe Breen as a 6-year-old). After the death in infancy of the youngest girl, the McCourts decide to return to Limerick, home of Angela's family. Things are not much better there, as Malachy is rarely able to find work, and drinks what little money he manages to earn. It is left to Frank to grow up quickly and help the family, shoveling coal as a young teen (Ciaran Owens) and becoming a telegram delivery boy as an older teen (Michael Legge) to help the family and fulfill his dream of returning to America.
Biographical stories can be tricky to pull off dramatically, since it's easy to portray them as a series of stand-alone episodes rather than part of a thematically consistent story. That's the problem that plagues ANGELA'S ASHES in Parker's attempt to maintain the integrity of McCourt's tales. This is a film composed almost entirely of vignettes: Frank's First Communion, Frank's work on the coal heap, Frank's visit with some classmates to see his first naked girls, etc. Some of them amuse, and some of them are touching, but few of them resonate the way it seems they should. When teenage Frank begins a furtive relationship with a house-bound consumptive girl, there's the sense we should feel his emotions as a defining moment in his life. Instead, it plays as just one more vignette in a life of First Communion, work on the coal heap and seeing naked girls.
The one place ANGELA'S ASHES does resonate -- if all too briefly -- is in the portrayal of Frank's father. Malachy is a complex character whose life is doomed by the combination of his own weakness and his nerve of being a Northern Irishman living in Limerick; McCourt's story recognizes the prejudice that keeps Malachy from work, while still acknowledging how he ruins the few opportunities he does get. Carlyle's performance, combining a strange pride and sincere intentions with a pathetic sickness of the soul, is one of the best things about ANGELA'S ASHES (Emily Watson, by comparison, has little to do but smoke and look determined). The wrenching moments in which Malachy disappoints his family -- particularly when Frank tries to balance his disappointment with his love for his father -- give the film its emotional weight. When Malachy leaves the narrative, it never quite has as much to say.
I'm told that McCourt's book uses a first person, present tense narrative structure, allowing readers to view his experiences through the eyes of the child he was. I can imagine that device giving his experiences more immediacy, something to sustain the story beyond mere sympathy for young Frank's plight. As a film, ANGELA'S ASHES works mostly as a period record, with production designer Geoffrey Kirkland, costume designer Consolata Boyle and cinematographer Michael Seresin working their technical magic on a somber, straightforward script. Too much of it is admirable without necessarily being engaging, serving as a mere litany of childhood miseries. Without the father/son angle that had served the film so well, ANGELA'S ASHES drifts into two and a half hours of variations on a grim, grimy theme.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 blight operas: 6.
Visit Scott Renshaw's Screening Room http://www.inconnect.com/~renshaw/ *** Subscribe to receive new reviews directly by email! See the Screening Room for details, or reply to this message with subject "Subscribe".
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews