Angela's Ashes

source: Angela's Ashes

If you enjoy spending time sitting in a well-used and ill-kept outhouse, you'll probably enjoy this movie. I didn't need two and a half hours of retrospective about growing up poor in depression-era Ireland to convince me it must have been a rough time. This picture absolutely bathes itself in just about every disgusting bit of detail that the Hollywood of today can't get enough of – urination, *, defecation, fornication, vomiting, brutality… it's all here, folks, overdone for your motion picture pleasure. My parents grew up dirt poor in depression era Philadelphia and I've heard all the stories many times. I don't know how they were able to survive, but their's was a terribly strong generation. We don't need to witness the depravity over and over again to get the picture. But then Hollywood would have missed the opportunity to show more of the urination, *, etc. that they so love.

Angela's Ashes is based on a 1999 memoir of the same name by Irish-American author Frank McCourt. Both the novel and movie detail his experiences growing up in the impoverished slums of Limerick Ireland during the time of the Great Depression. McCourt was, strangely enough, born in NYC but his parents decided to pack up the family and move back to Ireland upon the death of their infant daughter. When the baby dies, Angela (Frank's mother) shuts down completely and is unable to care for her other four children. Some less than helpful relatives intervene and soon they are on a boat. The deaths of McCourt's three siblings (two the result of disease and malnutrition) provides for some of the most haunting imagery. I think back on the scene where one of Angela's beautiful twin boys lies white in death on her bed as she cuddles him in her arms. In another particularly poignant scene, ten-year-old Frank goes looking for his drunkard father Malachy in a pub and sees him drinking right on top of his dead baby's casket. It's scenes like this that make Angela's Ashes such a heart rending experience. It would have been easy for this film to turn into nothing but a couple hours of despair, but thankfully, McCourt has a good sense of humor and filled his memoir with plenty of comedic anecdotes to be sprinkled here and there.

Spoilers herein. Great films transport us to different worlds and confront us with the unexpected. Poor films dip into the common vocabulary of everyday images and use them to simply manipulate us. This is a poor film; one manipulative, unoriginal episode after another. Not a shred of imagination. Not one surprise. What's wrong with the people portrayed is that they have no control over who they are and how they react. They are manipulated by the arbitrariness of a society that is based on solid roles and rules. A real film, a good film would transcend that in its perspective. But we are plunked in that dark room and presented with what? We are manipulated by the arbitrariness of a film vocabulary that is based on rote roles and rules. We have no control, but are blindly manipulated in just the same fashion as the sorry characters we are watching (and pitying). Makes me feel dirty that I am swept up in these emotions so blithely. How different am I from this family to be played so by Hollywood just as these characters are played by the Church? Makes me angry at McCourt, who is credibly accused of making much of this up in order to manipulate us - he is a world away from Dylan Thomas who knew how to create rather than copy. Makes me disappointed in Parker, but then look at his career since the original and fresh `Fame.' He specializes in the shameful exploitation of the obvious. Ms Watson is quickly moving up to my short list of actresses to watch, with Cate, Kate and Julianne. No matter that the film is exploitive. She brings a focus that is extraordinary. She transports. The child actors are honest as well. In a decade or so, if Emily matures and becomes as well respected as, say Streep. Then this film will be worth watching to see what she is doing, how she is moving within her skin. Otherwise, better to cry over a real life.

I'd have more respect for the author if he'd stayed in Ireland and tried to do something positive for his people."Author" being the appropriate word as apparently Mr McCourt later admitted to making a significant proportion of "Angela's Ashes" up. "Welcome to Ireland - please set your watches back 100 years" as the Aer Lingus cabin crew used to say jokingly to one another. I blame the Brits - I mean why not?You'll never get to heaven if you blame The Pope now will you? However you dress it up,the McCourt's unquestioning acceptance of the Church's teachings and their own position at the absolute bottom of the pile were at least partly to blame for the intense misery of their lives. Set in what is clearly Limerick's rainy season,the movie is an unremitting grind of squalor.Women are merely baby - making machines and if you lose one child you can have another soon enough so you can. In complete contrast to the wonderful "The Commitments" where the very existence of the group is a two - fingered affront to the perceived roles of its members,"Angela's Ashes" shows the Irish people to be fearful,superstitious and totally subservient to the Church/State which is a sign of how much the country has developed in the intervening years. Mr R.Carlyle has a fine old time as the drunken wastrel father .Weak,gaunt and haunted,he is too much of a stereotype to engage any sympathy.Miss E.Watson,doomed to eternal pregnancy by her faith is stoic and loving. "Angela's Ashes" was a huge success as a book because you could put it down,open a nice Merlot,knock up an environmentally friendly sustainable snack then continue to read about some poor sods starving to death in a freezing cold country as you wriggled your toes in your Peruvian Lama wool socks. In the cinema there was no such comfort - hence the movie did rather less well. Misery - it is said - loves company.But apparently only in the privacy of your own home.

If you pitched a movie about historically accurate misery and poverty to any Hollywood exec, none would endure it for more than twenty seconds. So how did this get made? Well, when you present the same dreary idea with the words "It's based on the best-seller," things tend to get green-lighted. You know, there's a ready audience to extract admission fees from. Without that, this project had no possibility of being made. There are exactly zero people in the world clamoring for a generously long, depressing movie. This movie really needed an adaptation that found (or manufactured) some engrossing throughline in the episodic material. Making it filmic instead of a slavishly, literal depiction of the books imagery would have been just dandy too. But no. Rabid fans tend not to like that. They want the book filmed as if the imagery they supplied while reading it were merely recorded. This is the limp task we ask of filmed novels in this era. It's not compelling. Rarely does a movie survive a books fan base. They must have devised special life-sucking camera filters to make this. Everything is grey and torpid. But if there's one thing this story didn't need is to have it's misery overdetermined by ponderous direction, a ponderous script, ponderous production design, a ponderous poster of a scowling child and that ponderous Misery-Vision camera work. As my Irish relatives might say "Oh for f***'s Sake!" Didn't a colored piece of broken glass occasionally end up in their hands that didn't get painted grey by the gloom patrol? Even the fruit is grey in McCourts world. When I first heard his reading of the first page or two of this on NPR it made me laugh out loud. I thought it was going to be a moderate view of his bad childhood relieved by a little humor. Instead I discovered the book to be an exercise in troweling misery upon misery without edification, and I never made it; neither could some of my friends who wanted to open a vein after just a few chapters. It was like paddling upstream through oatmeal (grey oatmeal) wearing a blindfold (grey also). I don't know what this book did for the readers who made it a best-seller, nor did I realize that there were such enormous audiences in the entertainment age hoping to feel seriously miserable. By page 50 I was shouting "We've got it, Frank!" I don't know how I got the tone so wrong from his reading. There's barely a sentence that survives the all-pervading clutch of gloom and death. If this material weren't already exhausted in just two iterations, it could be spoofed perfectly with the figure of death and his scythe gleefully chopping people down mid-sentence every couple of minutes, and extras in the background painting entire fruitstands grey.

Being married to a man from Ireland, I can really relate to this movie. I went to see his family home in 1978 and he grew up in very similar circumstances. The movie portrays the depression and drinking problems the Irish have. Emily Watson is great as his mother- she has to swallow her pride and beg so her kids can have food and clothes. The Vincent De Paul society is a great presence in Ireland. The way the kids are beat in school is right on- my husband tells me horror stories of how the priests and nuns treated him. Like Frankie he was able to get out of the country when he was 19-- This movie captures both the good and the bad of McCourt's book. I showed it to my son so now he understands his father a lot better. As a whole the movie deserves a lot of credit for staying true to McCourt's words. Robert Carlyle is good as Frankie's father. Everyone in the movie-- fits one type of Irish personality. We still keep candles burning in front of the statue of Mary at home. I will watch this move again so I can pick up on some of the other aspects of Irish life.

The Emerald Isle, due to its naturally green countryside, has more than its fair share of rain; we see plenty of that in `Angela's Ashes: and people splashing or wading through murky puddles to get to their rented houses: the tenants may be able to afford the few shillings rent per week, or may be not. Such were the conditions in a slum of Limerick, locality afamed for its humorous five-lined verses, in the west of Eire, then still very much under English `ownership'. Eire is today the only European country to have less population than it did in 1900. Reading/watching `Angela's Ashes' makes it quite clear why that was so: the Irish emigrated to North America and Australia, and indeed as a lad trying to grow up in post-war London I could hear comments like `there are more Irish in Islington than in Ireland'. I could have mentioned any other suburb of London, but it so happens that Alan Parker and Emily Watson were both born in this inner suburb. Many of those Irish émigrés found fame and fortune, and their offspring have helped to keep the White House occupied, though mostly they found their ways into suburbs of Chicago, New York, Boston, etc. But the 1930's in poor suburbs of New York in the Great Depression was hardly a friendly environment lurking behind the awesome sight of the lady with the torch in the harbour (a present of the French Government). `Angela's Ashes' records those grim years for a poor family, based on hard autobiographical facts; but Frank McCourt's book better conveys that curiously Irish sense of fatalistic humour combined with that strangely abject Catholicism so pervasive in life of those times. The elements contrast and contradict themselves: the useless alcoholic father who must be respected because he is their father, though later he disappears, and the boy's (Frankie) obedient and supposedly devout sessions at the confessionary box, would seem to veer into mirth if it were not for the sinister underlying sociological aspects. And it is the classroom where much of this spoon-fed doctrinal interpretation obviates the ruthless imposition of supposedly `clean' ideology - whether Catholic or not. Beautifully filmed in almost black and white, with more colour creeping in as the film progresses, undoubtedly Alan Parker has done a good job and has tried to remain faithful to the philosophical concepts of the book. Excellent Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle, but no less so the different youngsters used in the film as the children grew up, especially Michael Legge. Other secondary actors are all exemplary, well cast. The result is a film that has an authentic feel to it, such that having already read the book and seeing this film twice in no way diminishes the interest it suscitates. The music is a very different kind of John Williams to what we are accustomed, giving correct ambience to the story's unfolding.

The joy of the author's verse, as well his uniquely ironic, heartwarming and witty perspective even in the worst of times, is an exceptional and rare inspiration hardly captured in this weak account which merely grabs for the Oscar. The cinematography only adds to the movie's dismal tone. In a country as glorious as Ireland, one can only surmise that Alan Parker refused to include even one sunny, green, lush and hopeful day. As an Irish-Italian-American, it is tragic to see films that persist in presenting overrun stereotypes of the "victimized" Irish, like the "Mafia" Mediterranean. Though members of both groups have undoubtedly suffered individually and collectively, revealing their respective strength and preservation is far more compelling. Watch Jim Sheridan's "In America" instead.

There's a famous sketch with several men gathered round a table and one ejaculates : " When I were a lad we didn't get anything to eat six years and we were grateful to get nothing " Put out by this type of inverted snobbery another exclaims " You had things easy , when I were a lad I worked twenty seven hours down a pit every single day " The impromptu urinating contest continues with other members claiming " You had things soft , when I were a lad my dad would make us drink sulphuric acid then he'd chop our heads off and stick them on a pole " You do find yourself reminded of this sketch while watching Alan Parker's ANGELA ASHE'S the film version of Frank McCourt's autobiography . The story starts in a crowded hovel in New York where an ex-pat Irish family called McCourt live . I'm probably misleading you if I use the word " live " because if that's living I sure don't want to find out what dying must be like . things are so bad that they move back to County Limerick in Ireland . You know that phrase " out of the frying pan into the fire " ? well this happens to the McCourt family , just when you think things can't get any worse they get worse - This happens in every single scene . Some people have criticised Alan Parker's interpretation of THE WALL as being so depressing as to be unwatchable , but compared to this Pink Floyd's rock opera is a musical comedy This doesn't mean that ANGELA'S ASHES should be viewed as being a bad film . Far from it since it's the best movie Parker had made for many years and much of it is down to casting two of Britain's most consistent thespians from that era namely Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle . Carlyle especially gives a great and understated performance as Malachy McCourt one of the most hateful and despicable characters he's ever played . He's by no means the raving psychopath that he played in TRAINSPOTTING but you will hate him none the less . But despite the talent behind and in front of the camera and the attempts at humour which the Celtic race are renowned for you'll probably only want to watch this movie once due to the depressing subject matter .