Film review: Top-flight acting lifts ‘Angela’s Ashes’

By Michael Gray

ANGELA’S ASHES. Directed by Alan Parker. Starring Robert Carlyle and Emily Watson. Paramount Pictures. Opens Dec. 25

The astonishing success of Frank McCourt’s memoir of his poverty-stricken childhood in Brooklyn and Limerick, "Angela’s Ashes" (five million copies sold and counting, and still holding a respectable position on bestseller lists worldwide three years after publication) made a screen adaptation of the book virtually inevitable. When the word went out that Alan Parker would direct the film version, the versatile English director who had scored such a commercial and artistic success with his previous Irish film, "The Commitments," seemed to be the right choice to visualize McCourt’s text.

Add to the mix two of the best actors in Britain today, Robert Carlyle, star of "The Full Monty," "Cracker" and "Trainspotting," and Emily Watson from "Breaking the Waves," "Hilary and Jackie," and "The Boxer" (ignore the usual carping about the surfeit of Irish actors who might have filled those roles), and it seemed the filmmakers couldn’t go wrong. All they needed to guarantee awards and bumper box office was a casting call to the schoolboys of Ireland to find cute moptops for the juvenile roles. And find them they did, turning up three Frankies and three Malachys to play the McCourt siblings at different ages, after putting thousands of youngsters through their paces.

But the plot went astray on them when it came to the one crucial component that made those millions of readers bear with McCourt through hundreds of pages of misery, hunger and humiliation: the narrative voice. The story that had rattled around in Frank McCourt’s head for decades before he committed it to paper was told in the voice of his younger self, starting as a near-infant in Brooklyn, progressing seamlessy, and always in the present tense, to that of a Limerick primary schoolboy, then adolescent, and finally young adult. The maturing of the young mind is deftly handled by the author, and his ability to project himself into the mindset of the boy he once was, at 7, at 11, and at 16, to recount his story with a child’s warmth, humor and anger, is the book’s greatest strength.

Unfortunately, McCourt was not actively involved in writing the screenplay, and cowriters Laura Jones and Alan Parker opted to tell Frankie’s tale with the well-modulated tones of an adult narrator, losing the immediacy of the original text. Children live in the present, care little about what has gone before and despite the best efforts of adults to make them worry about it, spend little time pondering the future. An adult narrator looking back across half a century will inevitably lose all of the wonder and perplexity of the child Frankie as he tries to figure out what’s going on in a grim world run by adults, and it is very much to the detriment of the film that Parker decided to tell it like this.

The heartrending episodes from the book are all there — the deaths of Frank’s sister Margaret and his twin brothers, Oliver and Eugene, his father’s chronic failure to provide for the family, and the daily cruelties inflicted by the Catholic education system on the poor of Limerick. They’re all vividly depicted, but recounted with a narrative distance that fails to engage the viewer.

Carlyle’s efforts as Frank’s drunken father, the North of Ireland man with the funny manner who can’t hold down a job, are negated by the fact that he’s playing a character typified more by his absence than his presence; and the role of Angela, permanently wilting from hunger, despair and poor health, leaves Emily Watson short on dialogue and makes the McCourts’ mother as inscrutable on screen as she was in the book.

While the film is impressively dressed by Ireland’s top costume designer Consolata Boyle, and faithfully recreates the rank Limerick slums in which the McCourts struggled to survive, it delivers too much damp, dismal squalor and not enough of the book’s narrative uplift and loquacious use of English.

This tough childhood left McCourt with little room for sentimentality, but Parker has no qualms about piling it on in Spielbergian quantities, closing the film with a gigantic moon worthy of ET, and a tacky apparition to the young adult Frank of his younger selves, before he takes the boat to America and salvation. This scene comes out of nowhere and is untypical of its director and its source material.

Despite this unevenness, Parker can count on a sizable number of the five million who bought the book and are eagerly awaiting the film to show up at the cinema turnstiles, but it’s inevitable they will find the screen version falls far short of the raconteurial highs of the original.