Angela's Ashes

Leading off yet a couple more entries from Hollywood's most recent rush to the bookstore is director Alan Parker's adaptation of Frank McCourt's memoir of surviving his squalid childhood in 1930s-40s Ireland. Depicting abject, unimaginable poverty from the viewpoint of a young boy, Parker, who also wrote the screenplay, has in curious fashion come full circle from his first film, the 1976 kiddie Prohibition gangster musical Bugsy Malone.

Using a trio of un- to little-known young Irish actors to play Frank at different ages, Angela's Ashes chronicles ten years or so with a family so poor they had to move back to Ireland in 1935 after fleeing to the States from famine and assorted economic hardship in their homeland only to wind up in the middle of The Depression. Most striking is Frankie at five, an indomitable little urchin facing rampant disease, hunger, class prejudice, tribal-quality Catholicism, fleas, nearly annual birth and/or death of a sibling, and an "Every Sperm Is Sacred" alcoholic father (Trainspotting's Robert Carlyle, sporting another great British Isles accent) who's too entertaining to hate but utterly worthless as a provider. His mother Angela (Emily Watson) never really recovers from pregnancy long enough to regain health, much less get the job his father, a good-natured, proud but shiftless Northern Irish Protestant among Limerick Romans, is unable to find and hold. But in the midst of begging, scrounging, sleeping six-to-a-bed, and ritual introduction to catechism, confession, communion, and confirmation, Frankie and his untamed Presbyterian cowlick take on each hardship with a furious, glaring independence.

A succession of comically rigid, and largely useless, schoolteachers follows, until Frankie is finally blessed with an instructor who cultivates his literary spark, culminating in a hilariously candid "If Christ Were Born in Limerick" essay that gets him reinstated to his class after typhoid fever threatens to set him back a year. He finds further escape co-suffering the ravages of puberty with his circle of friends, somehow scrounging a coin for admission to the local cinema to catch westerns and Jimmy Cagney movies. Eventually jobs writing threatening letters for the local moneylender and delivering postal telegrams will hold out hope of one day saving enough money to return to America; the latter vocation will also afford a tentative, guilt-ridden introduction to romance.

Filmed on location in Limerick, Dublin, and Cork, Angela's Ashes deals with a subject rarely broached in film: white European poverty. But, thanks especially to an outstanding cast -- Emily Watson is once again angelic under adversity (and fertility), and newcomer Joseph Breen is downright amazing as youngest Frankie -- the dominant image is of determined humor through the gloom -- a lusty, real-life Our Gang. A

This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page