More
Than A Bad Movie Almost A Racial Slur
In
Tennessee they write country songs where everybody catches
fatal diseases, or gets murdered or divorced and in the end
the dog dies. From Ireland we bring you Angela’s Ashes - Alan
Parker’s film adaptation of Frank McCourt’s prize-winning
book.
By the time the hero's third sibling bites the dust maybe
30 minutes in (or was that days?) you'll be rolling your eyes
to the ceiling and praying he's next and it will all soon
be over. It won't.
It takes Parker two and a half hours to tell a story that
could be transported to Nashville and summed up by Tammy Wynette
in under 4 minutes. The setting is Limerick in Ireland in
the 30s and 40s. The theme is misery - McCourt’s but more
particularly the audience’s - endlessly sign-posted by absolutely
unrelenting and unrealistic movie-rain. The plot - and I use
the term in it’s loosest possible sense - basically with little
variation revolves around: child dies, dad gets drunk, child
is born, dad gets drunk, repeat absolutely ad nauseum.
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Nor are we ever given any chance to appreciate how Frank McCourt
senior (Robert Carlyle) transforms with regularity from the
loving story-telling dad bouncing children on his knee into
the kind of man who would spend money sent for a new baby
on booze, and then changes back again the following morning.
His solitary drinking adventures are never shown as anything
more than pathetic - he stumbles in, singing rebel songs,
to the family hovel in the early hours, tripping over buckets
of piss. It’s as if we’re told - "well you saw the children
die, who wouldn’t go and get drunk?" But shouldn't a fine
actor like Carlyle actually be able to convey some of the
inner torment that must have driven this despairing cycle.
After all Mrs McCourt (Emily Watson) loses the children as
well but manages to be stoical throughout. And after all there
have always been grim stories and long-suffering heroes who
would never once have failed a breathalyser test. How many
of Dickens' heroes wound up as bathetic bar-flies? In the
end the suspicion must be that it was felt unnecessary to
convey any of these emotional complexities because - for the
bulk of it’s audience - "he’s an Irishman so he gets drunk"
was perhaps the only explanation required.
But I have to go back to the rain, which possibly overshadows
young McCourt (played well by three Irish actors Joe Breen,
Ciaran Owens, and Michael Legge) as the film’s central character.
And the rain is a terrible scene-hogger, a laughable over-actor,
more suited to vaudeville than the cinema screen. It is of
a variety - incessant and pounding - that may occur in the
occasional tropical storm but has never been witnessed in
Ireland, at least since biblical times. And the weather throughout
is presented in the same sunny light as Tim Burton’s Gotham
in the first two Batman pictures. Only at the end when teenage
McCourt sets off for America does the sun ever break through
the clouds. Thanks for that, Alan - we, the people of Ireland,
truly appreciate it.
What perhaps makes the whole thing so galling is that Parker
has publicly defended lapses in historical accuracy in the
story by insisting this is a memoir rather than strictly autobiographical.
One second Alan, so what you’re saying is that this isn’t
actually true? Because it occurs to me that if, for the sake
of drama, you’re willing to excise a few facts, why not go
the whole hog and excise enough to make it interesting or
even - God forbid - entertaining?
I’m not suggesting a young-Frank-uncovers-pirates’-gold kind
of sub-plot but do you think we could have had one dead brother
less? A girlfriend who didn’t die of TB? Dad pops out for
a pint with the lads but arrives back in time for dinner with
Chinese takeaway for everyone? Any variety would be welcome
in a film of this length but substantively there is none.
Angela’s Ashes premiered in Ireland but I must confess some
bafflement on this point. After all, the whole grim confection
was plainly cooked up for the audience abroad, perhaps primarily
the kind of American who still believes the Irish live in
thatched cottages and travel to work in the fields on a donkey
or else stay in the pub all day drowning their tears.
The people of Limerick have in effect disowned McCourt and
Parker for the way they have presented the city and native
film star Richard Harris wrote a scathing attack on the pair
in the UK’s Sunday Times. Although the irony of the inhabitants
of the latter-day "knife-capital of Ireland" getting in a
tizzy about the image of their city 60+ years ago may not
have escaped everyone.
That Alan Parker is the same film-maker who brought us The
Commitments, Angel Heart and even Bugsy Malone is more than
a little depressing. This is simply a bad film. Well shot,
competently acted but bad to the core. If Woody Allen writes
love-letters to New York in his films, this is Parker and
McCourt’s collaborative poison-pen dispatch to Ireland. Because
this country for all it’s historical travails and miseries
was never dull and Angela’s Ashes most assuredly and relentlessly
is.
Brian
O Conaill
The
Z Review thinks this sounds like a complete shame, Alan Parker
and Robert Carlyle are two people who we normally expect great
things from at the cinema
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