Angela's Ashes

Plot synopsis:
Five-year-old Francis "Frankie" McCourt (Joe Breen) is the eldest son of Irish immigrants Malachy (Robert Carlyle) and Angela (Emily Watson). Frankie and his brothers (Malachy Jr., a year younger, and two-year-old twins Oliver and Eugene) were all American-born, and the family resides in a small apartment in Brooklyn. In 1935, Angela gives birth to a daughter, Margaret, who survives only a few days. Angela becomes depressed and sick, and the boys start to rely on neighbors for food. Angela's relatives visit and arrange for the family to move back to Angela's hometown of Limerick, Ireland. They make the trip, although Angela's family does not approve of Malachy and generally shun him.Money is scarce in Limerick and the living conditions are nearly squalid. The McCourts move into their new house, in which they encounter problems such as flea-ridden mattresses. The nearby Shannon River, combined with constant rain and unsanitary conditions, cause disease to be rampant. Little Oliver suddenly becomes ill and dies. The family, still recovering from Margaret's death, is forced to bury another child. Frankie and Malachy Jr. spend extra time with the remaining twin, Eugene, but he soon succumbs as well.Angela, who has lost three children in five months and is pregnant again, cannot bear the memories that linger in their current house. The family moves, though their new home is no improvement. Their house is right next to the lavatory used by the whole block, which provides a constant stink. Frankie and young Malachy (Shane Murray-Cocoran) are sent to school, where they receive strict religious lessons and frequent corporal punishment from their teachers. Frankie begins to prepare for his first communion.Malachy, though a loving husband and father, is an alcoholic and cannot control his vices. He eventually finds a job at a cement factory, and his family's hopes are high. After his first day he goes to the pub, spends all his wages on liquor, comes stumbling home late, misses work the next morning, and is fired. Though his sons love him, they are dismayed and angered by his behavior.Angela has another son, Michael. Frankie endures a comically fussy first communion, due to his grandmother's religious superstitions. He and Malachy Jr. begin to make friends with other boys in the lane, who teach them about "girls bodies, and dirty things in general."When Frankie is ten (now played by Ciaran Owens), his mother enrolls him in Irish dancing class, which he despises. Eventually, he and his friend Paddy simply go to the movies instead, and Frankie makes up dance routines when he gets home, making his parents think he went to class. The boys often skip school, running around the countryside and wreaking havoc on nearby farms. Angela has her final child, another son called Alphonsus, or "Alphie." Frankie develops typhoid, and is given a blood transfusion and hospitalized for two months. While in the hospital, he develops a love for reading Shakespeare.When he is well enough to return to school, Frankie is held back a year because of the time he missed. He is miserable and ashamed to be in the same class as his younger brother, and he prays for a miracle to move him up a grade. He is given a special assignment to write an essay about how Jesus Christ might have grown up if he had been born in Limerick. Frankie writes a paper explaining that the cold, wet climate would have given Jesus consumption and he would have died much younger, leading to no crucifixion and no Catholic church, and no one having to write papers about him in school. The teachers, impressed with his creativity and writing skills, return him to the sixth form.Malachy, along with many other Limerick men, goes to England to find work. However, he sends money to his family only once. Desperate, Angela joins crowds of women in begging outside the church for the priests' leftovers. Frankie gets a job helping an elderly man deliver coal, but the coal dust gives Frankie severe conjunctivitis and his mother forces him to quit.Several years later, Malachy has not returned from England. Angela and her sons break down a wall in their apartment for firewood, and are evicted for the damage. They move in with a distant cousin, Laman Griffin, who is cruel and disgusting, and soon forces a sexual relationship on Angela. Frankie (Michael Legge), now fifteen, refuses to live under Griffin's roof, and moves in with Angela's brother Pat. Frankie gets a job as a telegram boy for the post office, and his irritable Aunt Aggie surprises him by buying him a suit of new clothes for his first day. At one of his telegram stops, Frankie meets a teenage girl named Theresa who suffers from consumption. Despite her condition, they begin to make love whenever Frankie stops by with a telegram. When Theresa finally succumbs, Frankie fears his actions have sent her to hell.Though racked with guilt over Theresa, Frankie goes with his uncle to the pub for his fist pint on his sixteenth birthday. Frankie comes home drunk (just as his father had done for so many years), and gets into a heated argument with the visiting Angela. In a drunken rage, he slaps her. The next day, Frankie goes to church to pray for forgiveness, admitting to the priest that he had hit his mother and had sent Theresa to hell because of his sins. The priest comforts him by saying that the nuns at the hospital would not have let Theresa die without her last rites, and so she was surely sent to heaven. Frankie knows he must keep his wits about him if he does not want to end up like his father.Frankie is hired by the town moneylender to write threatening letters to customers with overdue payments. He hates the stingy old woman, but is determined to earn enough money to travel to America. Soon afterward the moneylender dies (of natural causes, while Frankie is out doing her shopping), and he takes cash and her logbook from her house. The logbook, which contains the names of everyone in the vicinity who owed money, lists everyone that Frankie knows. He throws the book into the Shannon, erasing their debts. With the new found money, he now has enough to book a spot on a ship bound for America.The night before Frankie's departure, he visits with his family to say goodbye. His aunt and uncle usher everyone outside to see the rare lunar eclipse. There is silence as the alley is flooded in darkness for a moment, and Frankie sees images of his childhood self. They disappear as the moonlight returns. Frankie finally leaves his childhood behind and arrives in New York, achieving his dream.

Tags: storytelling, flashback

Review:
He was the most hopeful person in the film, giving him character and determination, without losing his idealistic innocence.Emily Watson is a great dramatic actress and rose to the occasion to endow Angela with superhuman strength, courage and persistence in the face of crushing hardship and sorrow.
Frank McCourt's best-seller is so good, and this movie is so true to it, that if you liked one, you'll like this because rarely has film been so close to a book.
He should do more movies.The book, "Angela's Ashes," is a biography of McCourt and his extremely poor Irish family.
In the very opening scene of Alan Parker's `Angela's Ashes,' we are informed by the narrator and main character, Frankie McCourt, in a phrase that turns out to be a masterpiece of understatement, that he had a `miserable childhood'  but just how miserable we may not be quite adequately prepared to see.
Based on the author's Pulitzer Prize winning autobiographical memoir, this compelling film plunges us directly into the wretchedness and squalor of life in Depression-ridden Ireland, a setting overflowing with disease, starvation, joblessness and despair.
The film, like the novel on which it is based, never flinches from portraying the brutal reality of the life the people of this dreary town must endure.Yet, the film is also, at times, rich in humor and a sense of that unquenchable optimism that somehow exists in even the most hopeless of circumstances.
Frankie, despite the harsh conditions of his life, remains a boy focused on the good things that come his way, enduring even a loving but utterly irresponsible ne'er-do-well father (beautifully played by `The Full Monty's Robert Carlyle) with an indulgence and tolerance borne of filial devotion.
And the three boys who portray Frankie at various stages of the drama are utterly perfect in their wide-eyed naturalism, as they look upon a world often incomprehensible in its drabness and cruelty.It seems to be becoming a truism lately that, if you want to see the bleakest portrayal of life imaginable, go to see a film set in Ireland.
`Angela's Ashes' is rather, from beginning to end, a moving story about goodhearted, ordinary people learning to cope with the immense hardships life throws their way.
More than a period piece, this film works as a dramatic rendering of social history.Unlike the book, this film depicts Frank's childhood from a disembodied third person perspective, though it is liberally complemented by an effective voice-over narrative drawn almost directly from McCourt's own prose.
I've read both Angela's Ashes, and 'Tis (the sequal also by McCourt), and I think that really helped get a good perspective of what's going on.
But reading the book provides you with a little more background- more insight as to WHY the family is in the situation it is (the mother was "knocked up" and the two were forced into marriage and family life that probably NEITHER were ready for), and especially the impact of the death of the little baby girl had- most notable in the father.All in all, it was a great film...
The reason that it is unique, I think, is that if the viewer is open enough, they can get beneath the obvious misery that we're pelted with and really see the innocence of a child through out the story.I get really irritated with those that brush it off as "been there, done that", or "Woe is me, I was a poor Irish child." I think that shows ignorance and disgusting apathy- go watch a movie where stuff explodes to keep your feeble mind occupied, because you obviously are too shallow to understand what you're seeing.
That's pretty much exactly where the book ends- read (horror of HORRORS!) the sequal, 'Tis, to find out the rest.Either way- very touching film.
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.
The acting is superb, mainly by Emily Watson as the loving mother Angela McCout and Robert carlyle who gives his best performance since Trainspotting here as the father with almost three different personalities.
By rights, 'Angela's Ashes', Alan Parker's film of Frank McCourt's account of growing up in astonishingly deprived conditions in the impoverished theocracy of inter-war Ireland, should be unwatchable: just how much misery can a viewer be expected to take?
And while it doesn't quite have the emotional impact of the work, say, of Ken Loach, our foremost chronicler of contemporary poverty, there are still fine performances from all of the cast, most especially from the luminous Emily Watson (playing the eponymous Angela, whose ashes, however, appear to have disappeared from the screenplay).
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'.
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.
A movie of Frank McCourt's bestselling memoir was always going to be a box office smash and that is the only reason I can see that Alan Parker had to be associated with this project.
When I went to the theater last night to see "Angela's Ashes" I was prepared to fall in love with the story again.I'm sad to say that I was a slightly disappointed.Watching the film version to this wonderful story was like reading Cliff Notes to a novel:  the main points are covered, but small details that made the story so touching are left out.
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 .
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 .
Although I attended a very good school, I was disillusioned by Catholicism and couldn't wait to grow up and leave, and haven't had any regrets in doing so.None of us can choose when to be born, but I'll guarantee anyone who watches "Angela's Ashes" will be thankful to God, or "whoever" (?) that their childhood wasn't like Frank McCourt's..
For anyone who read the novel by Frank McCourt, `Angela's Ashes' would've been one of the most anticipated movies of the year.
The movie, however, directed by Alan Parker and starring Robert Carlyle and Emily Watson, unfortunately doesn't come close to capturing the desperation, hopelessness and pathos of the book.
His father, Malachy McCourt Sr., (played by Carlyle in the movie), wasn't a bad man, in an evil sense; he was just no good.
But otherwise, the movie was a worthy effort, showing the poverty in Limerick and how the father (Robert Carlyle) spent his earned money on alcohol, and the mother (Emily Watson) felt like she couldn't do anything about it.
An interesting device that the movie does use is that the soundtrack is mostly American jazz (which Frank probably heard a lot on the radio) rather than Irish jigs.So, the book is better - especially how he indicts the Catholic Church for keeping his family in poverty - but the movie is passable.
A penniless and hard drinking man (Robert Carlyle)and his wife (Emily Watson)try to raise a family in Depression-ridden 1930's Ireland.
Young Frank(Joe Breen)endures the deaths of siblings; the lack of compassion from his drunken irresponsible father; the sadness and desperation of his overwrought mother; his imposed parental role in raising his younger brothers; and the hopes and dreams of leaving a world of starvation and little opportunity.
The movie tells the story of an Irish boy growing up and trying to find hope and love amidst despair and abject poverty.
The father uses every bit of money he ever earns to drink "pints."  (More like gallons.)  The film shows slices of life in the growing up process, and details how Frank finally gets the money to leave Ireland and come to America.
The photography does a beautiful job of capturing the essence of poor and working-class Ireland in the '40s, with lots of rain and grayscale tones.The film ends sooner than the book, but leaves ample room for a sequel ('Tis?).
Angela's Ashes is a moving drama by long time and now retired director Alan Parker adapted from Frank McCourts Pulitzer Prize winning book about his childhood.
In the very same opening we are introduced to most of the main characters, the mother Angela McCourt (played by Oscar Nominee Emily Watson) and the somewhat loser father Malachy McCourt (played by Robert Carlyle), as well as his younger brother Malachy (jr.), the twins and his little baby sister.
In the film Frank McCourt is played by three different actors (Joe Breen, Ciaran Owens, and Michael Legge) without counting the narrator voiced by Andrew Bennett and contains for the most part different peaces of his life kept together by the wonderful narration.
Personally I think the film works beautifully in making a harsh and true look at the events and Frank McCourt himself has apparently praised the movie for a correct portrayal of his life.
A distraught young family make the long journey from America back to Ireland to discover it is much worse than when they left.Starring Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle.Written by Frank McCourt ( Book ), Laura Jones (Screenplay) and Alan Parker (Screenplay).Directed by Alan Parker.This is an incredibly touching and well acted movie.
The movie makes me like the book more, there are sections in the film that people would not understand if they have not read the book.
The reason that many of the parts were not very well clarified is because the producers had to cut many of the parts from the book because the movie was too long.In this production, the actors are excellent, especially the actors that played the role of Frank McCourt.
Maybe too late to speak about film produced on 1999 ,but for Iraqi people there are lovely chance to see film like Angela s ashes which based on memories of Irish writer McCourt who captured people around the world by scenes of poor family failed to live like others for different reasons.But the writer and the director had transporting to magic situation ignoring all these difficulties after the scene of moon set for awhile just like the scene of his childhood which had gone forever.Mr.McCourt as I think make the life so little like this moment and so big like the universe .When you spoke about things like these,you approached to Humanity.Atlast,I saw nice film and very genuine actress ..
Sure, maybe Mr Parker tried to put too much of the book's twists into the movie, so that it felt a little bit erratic from time to time, but still it may be the best film adaption of a successful novel I have ever seen..
It's almost like a black and white film.Emily Watson is sensational as Angela and likewise Robert Carlyle.
I haven't read the book, but I can say that the film did nothing to endear me to Frank's troubles the way the book appears to have for its readers.The photography and the performances were fine, if overwrought, but that's part of the balancing act of drama.
Alan Parker makes Frank McCourt's Pulitzer prize winning book into a long, fairly good, sometimes depressing movie.The story sees the young Frank McCourt attempting to survive his troubled life in Ireland in the 1930s and 40s.
Robert Carlyle stars as his alcoholic father and Emily Watson plays very well, Frank's troubled mother, Angela.The movie is meant to seem depressing, with a few hints of laughter occasionally popping up, but there is the idea that the movie just doesn't hit us the way it's supposed to.
The story being the true story of Frank's McCourt childhood, clearly limited the film makers, as we have such a heart breaking tale that it is close to difficult to watch at times.
Having read the Frank McCourt novel before seeing the film, I can say that it is a very faithful adaptation, but does it translate successfully from prose to screen, in my opinion I would say No. The film does however look good and some of the performances are very well acted but the film just seams to un-involving.
Another problem is that some of the segments of the book that are very important, Frank going to work for the first time is a deeply important part in the boy's life, in the film it gets about five minutes.
This first part of the film is too long by 20 minutes  brightened only by a fine performance by Robert Carlyle as Frankie's loving but no-good father.
Angela's Ashes is quite a good movie that brings you back to the poor and dark Ireland of the fifties.
Angela's Ashes- born poor, Irish, and Catholic, Frank McCourt entered the world with three strikes against him.
Alan Parker does a masterful job of translating Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes" to the screen.
This film is very faithful to the book, with uniform superb acting, and authentic scenes of Limerick, Ireland in the 1930's, 40's.Every character, from the three actors who play Frank at various ages, to the downtrodden but indomitable mother, to the tormented, pathetic father, and to all the other relatives and schoolmates, lovers, and friends who make up this time and place is absolutely superb.
Poverty and hard times abounded, and this movie makes no bones about it.The acting in this film was spectacular.
From the portrayal of Malachy Sr., to Angela, to Frank and the rest of his family, along with the other characters in the film, this is one of the best casts I have seen in a while.
At times, the McCourt family seem less like humans and more like animals seeking the necessities to maintain their meager existence.Although the movie was long, I would have liked a few more school episodes, as they were the most humorous parts of the book.I also would have liked an update at the end letting us know how Frank is in America.Very worth-while movie..
It is the story of a dirt-poor family struggling for survival in 1930's Ireland.I must admit that, going into it, I was afraid it would be a stereotypically depressing, slow moving odyssey (like, for instance, "Ironweed") but decided to give it a try it on the strength of Alan Parker's past films, many of which I love.
I believe that the movie has remained true to the book and is a tribute to Frank McCourt, his family and of course, the heroine, his mother, Angela..
In the film it rains all the time and everyone is miserable, even the relatively well-off, and there is little light relief.I thought Robert Carlyle was terrific as Dad, the lively, useless drunk it was hard to dislike, and Emily Watson as Angela the put upon mother was equally effective.
At the end of this film, Frank is back in America, like millions before him, to make a new life in a new land but probably would have succeeded in Ireland, if he had stayed.
Struck by the Frank Mccourts life, by his struggle through extreme poverty--I belive this is a film anyone who is not afraid to view something more captivatiing then what they think their lives are like, should see.
I suggest that if you want to truly identify with the story, then read the book.I will attempt to briefly describe this movie for you...it's a story of an Irish Catholic family who comes to America only to turn around and go home when things don't turn out well for them.
It is the true story of Frank McCourt and his family as they face the troubles of being poor.
This movie will be liked and enjoyed by many regardless if you have read the book or not.The acting in Angela's Ashes is strong especially by the two lead actors.
Emily Watson plays Angela McCourt the somber and dreary wife and mother of the family.
The three young men who play Frank McCourt are impressive but the best performance in this movie definitely comes from Robert Carlyle.
Angelas ashes gives examples of some of the best acting you are likely to see in a movie this year (2000).
I also am glad that a man like Frank McCourt was able to write a story about his life and that  Laura Jones(II), saw the potential to make it into a film with the help of  Alan Parker..