From the very moment that the adult Frankie McCourt’s voiceover unrolls drolly about that most awful thing, “a miserable Irish Catholic childhood”, it is clear that Alan Parker’s spacious adaptation of McCourt’s bestselling memoir, Angela’s Ashes, is going to be a delicious, vulgar, overblown, fattening calorific treat of a film.
Its sentimental excesses and lengthy unflinching grimness accumulate into a kind of sustained and entertaining effrontery, of a piece with the unreliable, semi-fictional nature of the source material.
For some it may be over the top by a good few kilometres; but Parker handles this movie with terrific dash and sweep, it has a generous human warmth and crackling dialogue that made me laugh out loud regularly for two and a half hours.
One does not have to know Limerick to enjoy this film the way I did: although an acquaintance with the Limerick of 2000 lends a frisson to this cracked and lachrymose love song about the Limerick of the Thirties and Forties, a time frame that tactfully omits both the city’s notorious anti-semitic “boycott” at the beginning of the century, and, at its end, its grim reputation as the “stab city” of crime, and then, finally, its increasing prosperity, a veritable Celtic tiger in receipt of EU funds.
Angela’s Ashes delights in immersing us in the terrible poverty of its back lanes of yore, juxtaposed with the undulations of O’Connell Street and Georgian terraces, the fog off the Shannon, the glowering outline of the Castle, the miserable, ubiquitous rain and damp.
Words cannot convey the unmitigated poverty-stricken awfulness of McCourt’s childhood, and Parker’s film traces every hideous and hilarious contour. Dispensing, largely, with the beer-commercial soft focus and the cliches of flute and fiddle, Parker has brought off an ambitious and engaging film about childhood and identity in the west of Ireland.
McCourt’s story begins with an unimaginable mixture of tragedy and shame; feckless and drunk, the family’s father, Malachy, a man from the north, fails to provide for his wife and children for their new life in America. Their baby sister Margaret dies in their squalor and they must return to Ireland, enduring the soul-blackening humiliation of seeing the Statue of Liberty receding as they sail away.
Robert Carlyle’s performance alternates bantam-cock belligerence for the IRA in his cups, drinking away money for the children’s food, with an intense and impotent love for the family he is failing. Emily Watson is a rather more diaphanous presence as the eponymous Angela, Frankie’s mother; there is not much for her to do.
Young Frank lives to see two more of his brothers die in their squalid home – in a bug-ridden bed the entire family share – with a ground floor permanently flooded and a communal lavatory outside that stinks “so they need a gas mask”. Frank himself survives typhoid and conjunctivitis that almost blinds him.
Death becomes banal; the two boys, Frank and Malachy, numbly accept the marble-faced corpses of their dead siblings in the house while they wait for the undertaker, and dirty stories and conversation carry on regardless. Only when Malachy senior actually has his pint on the tiny coffin wedged in front of him in WJ South’s pub, is some complaint raised.
It scarcely seems possible that comedy could arise from all this: but it does, partly hysterical death-of-Little-Nell laughs, but real, feel-good laughs too – and it is a testament to Parker’s control over the material that he can bring in this comic mode with such dexterity.
Largely it is to be found in the language of ordinary Limerick life. When Aunt Aggie attempts to brush down Frank’s greasy, tufty hair, with painful strokes of her retributive brush, she explodes: “It’s the Northern Ireland in you – it attracts the dort! You’ve hair on you like a Presbyterian!”
So it goes on: Frank grows into adolescence, getting a job writing threatening letters for the local money-lender, and conceiving a humid love of the pictures and a need to indulge in a virtual 24-hour frenzy of communal wanking in the fields about the town – it is here that the influence of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso is faintly to be found.
The representation of poverty on screen – the actual, moment-by-moment experience of real poverty – is very difficult, and a film-maker is always liable to charges of evasion and distortion. It is arguable that both Parker and McCourt exaggerate the notional severity of poverty for dramatic effect, while in real terms capitulating to the picturesque by mitigating its actual physical, visual circumstances. But there is such life and energy in this film, such pleasingly unselfconscious performances from the three actors playing Frank in various stages of growth, and such unflagging narrative drive and gusto. At two and a half hours, Angela’s Ashes is a long film, but I wished it were longer.