director
Alan Parker
screenwriters
Laura Jones
Alan Parker
based on
the book by
Frank McCourt
producers
David Brown
Alan Parker
Scott Rudin
cinematographer
Michael Seresin
music
John Williams
editor
Gerry Hambling
cast
Emily Watson (Angela McCourt)
Robert Carlyle (Dad)
Joe Breen (Young Frank)
Ciaran Owens (Middle Frank)
Michael Legge (Older Frank)
Ronnie Masterson (Grandma Sheehan)
Pauline McLynn (Aunt Aggie)
Andrew Bennett (Narrator)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 145m
u.s.
release: 12/25/99
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other alan
parker films
reviewed on this website:
- evita
- pink floyd - the
wall
|
Angela's
Ashes has a beautiful
ugly look. Rain soaks the dirty streets of Ireland, turning every
public area (and even some interiors) into mud puddles. The film
itself seems to have been bled dry by a vampire, and the pale,
skinny people plod through the muck and drizzle like wraiths.
When young Frank McCourt comes down with a nasty case of conjunctivitis,
it's the first sign of color in his face. All of this squalor
is perfectly composed and lighted, as if the director Alan Parker
were trying to find a visual equivalent to McCourt's elegant
prose.
The movie is bleak, depressing, and almost entirely grim -- every
time a character enjoys a small triumph, a big letdown is right
on its heels. (This is the sort of film in which a man finally
finds a job after months of searching, then celebrates at a pub
and gets so drunk he oversleeps the next day and gets fired.)
Angela's Ashes doesn't have a chance of scoring with a
mass audience (despite the popularity of McCourt's bestseller),
but I thoroughly enjoyed it -- enjoyed the relentless gloomy
realism, the refusal to put a happy face on McCourt's miserable
childhood. The events of the story are saddening; the movie's
integrity in handling them without flinching or melodrama is
satisfying, even refreshing.
Angela's Ashes begins not in Limerick (where most of the
film is set) but in Brooklyn, New York -- a confusing and intriguing
starting point for viewers who haven't read the book: Isn't this
supposed to be an Irish story? The McCourt parents -- Malachy
(Robert Carlyle), a hapless drunk, and his long-suffering wife
Angela (Emily Watson) -- watch as their newborn baby girl dies.
They already have four other children, including Frank, and they
decide to move back to Ireland, because Malachy isn't having
any luck in America. He has no better luck in Limerick, mainly
because he spends the family's little money at the pub.
In the past, Alan Parker has directed with a sledgehammer (particularly
in Midnight Express and Mississippi Burning) --
skillfully wielded, true, but some of us get tired of being hammered.
Working with less sensational material, though, Parker relaxes;
he doesn't have to push so hard. Angela's Ashes is actually
fairly similar to his best film (for me), 1982's divorce drama
Shoot the Moon, also about a pathetic husband and father
trying to hold his family together in the face of his wife's
contempt; the movies could be bookend pieces -- the dysfunctional
family in America and Ireland. (The absent father was also a
theme in his Pink Floyd -
The Wall, though that was more Roger Waters' conception.)
Here, Parker's work is naturalistic yet subtly stylized. You
see the beauty in the Limerick slums because that's what the
young Frank sees; he has no choice.
Parker isn't just a cold technician; he usually gets rich performances,
and he guides Watson and Carlyle through specific portraits of
misery, not just stereotypes of the Drunken Dad and Bitter Mom.
The actors make you feel the hopelessness of their situation;
they see no beauty in their surroundings. Parker has also deftly
cast the young Frank with three impressive child actors (Joe
Breen as the little Frank, Ciaran Owens as the adolescent Frank,
Michael Legge as the teen Frank), even though they don't much
resemble each other. It's as if the harsh life in Limerick has
reshaped Frank's features at each stage of development.
I suppose some admirers of the book may be disappointed: A book
is a book and a film is a film. And it's one thing to read about
McCourt's long list of childhood tragedies -- it's quite another
to actually see the dying babies, the grotesque living conditions,
the sheep's head served for Christmas dinner. I sympathize with
those who find the movie Angela's Ashes too depressing,
but on some level, perhaps, in removing much of Frank McCourt's
distancing lyricism, Parker has given us a more honest account.
Should dying babies not be depressing? |