In the movie version of Angela's Ashes, the harsh, God-fearing, hardscrabble, hungry childhood of Irish-American author Frank McCourt is rendered in all its glorious ugliness.
That is only partly a good thing. Movies are not books. The spell-binding rhythms of the best-selling novel are mutated into something different in Alan Parker's screen adaptation.
Parker's approach -- he co-wrote the screenplay with Laura Jones and then directed it -- is conventional and unadorned cinema, perhaps too much so. And so much so that the film seems belaboured, especially with its epic running time.
This is the methodical Parker who gave us Come See The Paradise, Evita and The Road To Wellville, not the innovative Parker who made Fame, Birdy and The Commitments.
Angela's Ashes, set briefly in New York and mostly in the Irish city of Limerick in the 1930s and '40s, is also quaint, despite the gritty subject matter. This is not only a period piece, it is like a period film itself, as if it could have been made 60 years ago. So it feels as formulaic and predictable.
At the same time, there is something so compelling, so forceful and even so humourous about McCourt's life journey that the film lifts us out of the Limerick gloom it depicts.
That is especially because production designer Geoffrey Kirkland and cinematographer Michael Seresin give the film such a luminous version of the Limerick slums. You can see the dirt and smell the filth, yet it seems oddly beautiful too.
The excellent ensemble of actors certainly helps in letting us survive the story's blunt truths. Led by a subtle Emily Watson as the mother, Angela McCourt, and an inwardly furious, utterly fascinating Robert Carlyle as her charming but alcoholic husband, the cast is without weakness in roles large and small.
Three youngsters -- eight-year-old Joe Breen, 13-year-old Ciaran Owens and 19-year-old Michael Legge -- play Frank McCourt in different segments. Breen, the kid who is featured in the ads and on posters, is an Irish farmer's son with a haunted visage and frightened eyes who perfectly captures McCourt's spirit and his monumental struggle to be human.
The film delves unabashedly into most of the ugly realities that McCourt describes in his autobiography: The starvation and deprivation of living poor in rain-drenched Limerick is presented as bluntly as in a documentary film.
Parker also extensively explores the abuse and bigotry of Church officials, neighbours and even family members because of class distinction and the father's Northern origins. The spectre of sexual blackmail is raised.
Society and its bureaucrats, leaders and money-lenders are all villains. Life itself is cruel enough. People's mean-spirited attitudes make it even more so. And the innocents -- the children such as Frank McCourt -- suffer most of all.
Angela's Ashes looks fiercely at that truth and tries to transform it into art. Often it succeeds.
(This film is rated PG)
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