Irish Phoenix
FILM: Angela's Ashes
DIRECTOR: Alan Parker
STARRING: Emily Watson, Robert Carlyle
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THE MCCOURT FAMILY RETURNS TO IRELAND ONLY TO FIND LIFE EVEN HARSHER THAN IN AMERICA IN ALAN PARKER'S LATEST FILM, ANGELA'SASHES.
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When Frank McCourt was 5 years old in 1935, at the height of the Depression,
his family left Brooklyn to return to Ireland, where the economic stagnation
and widespread suffering was even worse. There, the native children looked like
concentration-camp victims with their burr-cut scalps and fragile ribs like
match sticks poking through gray, unwashed skin. And yet, amid all the hunger,
ignorance and jaundiced meanness that greeted them, the McCourts rapidly became
even less stable than their desperate neighbors. This is the story told by
retired schoolteacher McCourt in his celebrated 1996 memoir, Angela's
Ashes, which captured the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, the
National Book Critics Circle Award, and other commendations. Now Alan Parker
brings McCourt's story to the big screen. The result is hardly a conventional
entertainment. At times, the storytelling is long on despairing about the human
condition. But this also is a tale of survival and, more importantly, of
soul.
The McCourts' problems in America accelerate when Frank's mother,
Angela (Emily Watson), gives birth to a daughter who dies after a few days.
Distraught by the infant's death, Frank's father, Malachy (Robert Carlyle),
goes out for cigarettes and doesn't return for a week. Angela, meanwhile, is so
incapacitated by grief and depression that she can't get out of bed. Thus, her
four sons -- Frank, 3-year-old Malachy Jr. and 1-year-old twins Eugene and
Oliver -- are left to fend for themselves. By the time neighbors intervene, the
children are starving and horribly foul. Relatives in America decide that the
family's only recourse is to return to Ireland where they can perhaps be
assisted by Angela's family. The McCourts are greeted in Ireland by
Angela's sister, brother-in-law and mother, but the Irish relatives
prove as warm as reptile skin. Their resources are negligible, and they
obviously lack much enthusiasm for sharing what they have with the McCourt
family. Moreover, they don't like Malachy because they think he's been tainted
with Protestantism due to his birth in Northern Ireland -- despite the fact
that Malachy had fought with the Irish Republican Army and was spirited away to
America in the first place to protect him from British authorities.
There are far more tangible reasons for disliking Malachy McCourt,
namely his profound weakness. Malachy is an alcoholic who is almost
pathologically unable to hold a job. He's got a likable nature, but he
repeatedly turns his wages into extended stints at whatever pub he passes on
the way home from work. His children might be wailing with starvation, but the
pint's siren call inevitably is stronger. Malachy is, in addition, crippled by
a pride disproportionate to his desperate circumstances. He won't pick up coal
dropped on the street by the delivery truck even if he has no other way to heat
his house. Depending on the dole and the humiliating gifts Angela elicits from
a condescending charity, the McCourts take lodging in a defiled building next
to the public toilet serving a dozen other families. The entire family sleeps
crammed into a single, flea-infested bed. When it rains, which it perpetually
does, the first floor floods ankle deep. In short order, malnutrition and
inadequate protection against the damp and the cold claim the lives of the
twins.
The film version of this story is immensely aided by the gifted
work of its actors. The three youngsters who portray Frank as a young boy (Joe
Breen), adolescent (Ciaran Owens) and late teen (Michael Legge) all are superb.
Breen, in particular, is absolutely heartbreaking. Emily Watson likely will
command an Oscar nomination for her work. Angela is so much a victim that the
easy path would have been to turn her into a saint. But Frank didn't see his
mother as a saint, and Watson interprets Angela as an agent in her own
degradation. She surrenders to depression. She both takes Malachy back
repeatedly and persistently tears him down with a razor-sharp tongue. Carlyle,
meanwhile, is every bit Watson's equal, and his task perhaps is even greater.
Central to the story is that Frank somehow manages to keep loving Malachy even
as he sees his father for the reprobate that he is. Such a vision requires
Carlyle to find qualities of caring in a man so despicably irresponsible. That
he manages is a considerable achievement.
The screenplay for Angela's Ashes, by director Parker and
Laura Jones, does leave some puzzling questions unanswered. Where does the
money come from that allows Frank to go to the movies and at one point to take
Irish dancing lessons? Given that the other Irish children seem to live in
circumstances little better than the McCourts', why are they so cruel to Frank
and his brothers? After Malachy finally abandons the family, and Angela
and the children are forced to take refuge in the house of a despotic cousin,
is the sexual relationship between Angela and the cousin consensual, coerced or
some combination?
The film has other failings as well. For one thing, there's
altogether too much vomiting. I allow my fiction-writing students a maximum of
one vomit scene per semester, but Parker includes at least five in the course
of this one film. As to less-disgusting complaints, the film could have used
scenes better suggesting the sexual chemistry between Angela and Malachy that
perhaps would explain why, despite their mutual misery, they clung to each
other so long. In addition, the movie could have profited from a more thorough
examination of the moral quandary Frank endures when he takes a job composing
threatening letters to the debtors of a cruel moneylender. The individuals
Frank threatens in the moneylender's name are people in circumstances just like
those of his own family. Yet, by working for the usurer, Frank provides himself
his first glimpse of prosperity. Rushing through this episode without pondering
its irony is a mistake. Last, the film ends with Frank's escape back to America
and never reveals that he went on to become a teacher. That he would lead a
life shaping young minds in so vastly different a way than his own cruel
teachers sought to shape his is the ultimate triumph of Frank McCourt's story,
but it is one never related here.
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YOUNG FRANK MCCOURT (MICHAEL LEGGE) AND HIS BROTHER, YOUNG MALACHY (SHANE
MURRAY), ARE TAUNTED BY THEIR CLASSMATES IN ANGELA'S ASHES.
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Still, this is an enduringly powerful piece of cinema (even if fans
of the book might find it comparably disappointing). Its portrait of poverty is
unblinking and as horrible as anything I've ever seen on film. The McCourt boys
are children who grow up with a bucket for a toilet, a bucket shared by a
family of six that has to be lugged to an outhouse to be emptied, a bucket that
a drunken father kicks over when he comes home in a stupor. Irish children of
the era like those in the McCourt family know such deprivation that the common
cold is a terrifying threat, pneumonia a sentence of death. Resources are so
scarce, and damp, penetrating cold is so omnipresent, that at one point the
McCourts are reduced to tearing down the interior walls of their own flat to
use as fireplace fuel. Ravenous hunger haunts the family. When Angela's
monstrous cousin drops fried potatoes on the floor in a moment of distraction,
the McCourt boys scramble under the table like snapping dogs after scraps. When
Frank finds an abandoned page of newspaper in which the local fish vendor has
wrapped a portion of cod and chips, the teenager frantically licks the grease
until his lips, nose and cheeks are black with ink.
In a passage that recalls Vittorio De Sica's tragically wrenching
A Brief Vacation, Frank comes down with typhoid and lies for many days
at the threshold of death. His condition is so grave that he has to be taken to
a sanatorium, where he lapses into a coma. A priest is summoned to administer
last rites. In the days after Frank's recovery, however, he is fed well and
afforded the opportunity for daily baths. By the time he is ready to be
returned to the squalor of his family's embrace, he has never been healthier.
As in A Brief Vacation, in which an Italian housewife escapes the
brutality of her abusive husband when she becomes seriously ill with
tuberculosis, Frank never knows such comfort as when he nearly dies.
And so it goes. Children starve and die. Angela retreats into a
shell of cynicism, resentment and despondence. And new children are born to
take their turns in the cycle of suffering. Malachy drinks and loses jobs.
Ultimately, he abandons his family altogether, a betrayal that is the result of
alcoholism and lifelong irresponsibility to be sure, but a disappearance that
also is the product of shame. That Frank survives with the intelligence, will
and spirit to become a schoolteacher and an author is nothing short of a
miracle. That he ultimately could tell the story of his childhood with a
forgiving heart is an example of astonishing grace.
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