# Angela's Ashes (1999)

### reviewed by
Bob Bloom

Angela's Ashes (1999) 3 1/2 stars out of 4. Starring Emily Watson, Robert Carlyle, Joe Breen, Ciaran Owens and Michael Legge. Written by Alan Parker and Laura Jones. Directed by Parker.

In a strange, almost perverse way, "Angela's Ashes" is a feel-good movie. You stumble out of the theater after watching two-plus hours about one family coping with a poverty level that is unimaginable to most of us, and you want to clasp your hands and whisper a prayer to whatever deity you worship, thanking him (or her) for whatever bounties you have.

Many will find the abject misery displayed in this adaptation of Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir hard to ingest.

What keeps the movie from being unbearably morose is the bits of humor displayed throughout the proceedings. Even amidst the most dire of circumstances - and as long as they are together - the McCourts can rummage for scraps of happiness.

     And scraps are the main course at the McCourts - when they are
    available.

Director Alan Parker's adaptation is wet and bleak. Death is a constant neighbor, hunger a daily playmate, despair a daily companion.

Set mostly in Limerick, Ireland, in the 1930s and ‘40s, "Angela's Ashes" almost revels in the displaying the hardships endured by the McCourts.

Children are born, then die. The local church is no help, neither are the local charities who would rather judge than assist.

Part of the problem is simple prejudice. Malachy McCourt (Robert Carlyle) is a Protestant from Belfast. But his wife, Angela (Emily Watson) is a Catholic girl from Limerick. In a nation with such sectarian hatred and religious divisiveness as Ireland, such a union is scandalous.

Plus, Malachy is a wastrel. He drinks and cannot hold a job. His only function is to entertain his children with tall tales and legends from Irish history.

The McCourts are a family, as an adult Frank narrates, that do things backwards.

The family leaves the slums of Brooklyn, N.Y., to return to a harsher, more unforgiving live back in Limerick.

Parker presents all the wants and hunger and humiliations suffered by the McCourts with a journalist's objectivity. It would have been so easy to transform "Angela's Ashes" into a maudlin tear-jerker in which you could only feel sorry for this pitiful family.

Yet Parker creates - not a nobility - but an admirable fortitude so that you feel uncomfortable pitying the McCourts.

The film's performances are splendid. Watson, with her saintly visage, seems so soft, yet she is a woman of indomitable strength who goes to any lengths, makes any sacrifice to keep her family together and a roof over its head.

Carlyle is a dreamer, a drunkard, but not really a bad man. He is weak and overwhelmed, proud and stubborn. Yet he is a loving and caring father and husband.

Three young actors portray Frank at various stages and the transformation from one to the other is seamless. All three - Joe Breen (Young Frank, age 5 to 8), Ciaran Owens (Middle Frank, age 10 to 13) and Michael Legge (Older Frank), all display the gaunt, hollow-eyed, gnawing pangs that constant hunger creates. But they all also show spirit and an energy that allows Frank to constantly battle back.

In the beginning, the film's narrator intones the opening of McCourt's book: `When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how my brothers and I managed to survive at all. It was ... a miserable childhood; the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood; and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.'

Parker, who adapted McCourt's book with Laura Jones, has been able to transform misery into near poetry.

Some of the pieces in "Angela's Ashes" will leave you depressed, some may sicken and sadden. But - in the end - it will inspire.

Bob Bloom is the film critic at the Journal and Courier in Lafayette, IN. He can be reached by e-mail at bloom@journal-courier.com or at bobbloom@iquest.net

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