Angela’s Ashes

Angela’s Ashes

Frank McCourt’s book, Angela’s Ashes is a great example of the Irish stories of sadness turned into joy. I call it verbal history because one of his friends had told me that he spent years and decades honing the tales recounted in his autobiography at bars, dinner tables, and in the presence of friends. Anyway, this is obvious from how comfortable he sounds reading it on tape there’s such an easy cadence to his voice, a lilt that brings out all kinds of humor even as he describes terrible things happening.

Some people say audiobooks aren’t “real” books, but I think in Angela’s Ashes the author’s voice does just as much work as words on a page do to make you feel something about what they describe. Maybe Frank McCourt had an awful childhood, but he wouldn’t have traded it for another or at least not left out all these parts when he gave them back to us.

Humor is mostly absent from Alan Parker’s film adaptation of ‘Angela’s Ashes,’ which made me think of Mark Twain’s line about a woman trying to swear: “She knows the words but not the music.” The movie is so loyal to the book that my imaginings are replayed before my eyes; having been once formed they were never going to be transformed again. Flooded downstairs in Limerick houses; wretched families waiting for fathers who will never bring home money for eggs and bacon; happiness flying down streets on post office bicycles these are just how I pictured them. What isn’t here is tone.

The film is narrated by Andrew Bennett (who is no doubt both good and blameless), but like any reader can only ever do all he does here is reproduce the words on page without McCourt’s injection of nostalgia? McCourt remembers things he saw; Bennett reports things overheard.

The consequence is a highly skilled movie and terrific images missing a heart. There were probably thousands of childhoods like Frank McCourt’s, and thousands of families with too many children many of them dying young while the father drank dinner down at the pub and the mother threw herself upon the mercy of sniffy local charities.

What made McCourt’s autobiography special was expressed somehow beneath the very words as he used them: These experiences, wretched as they were, were not wasted on a mere victim, but somehow shaped him into the man capable of writing a fine book about them. The thing about Angela’s Ashes is that even misery is treasured there is in it, as in a soldier who will describe his worst day of battle with the subtext “But I survived, and I love to tell the story because it is the most interesting thing that has ever happened to me,” a certain lack of complaint.

Joe Breen (junior), Ciaran Owens (mid) and Michael Legge (senior) play Frank at different ages. He appears to be determined to find his own way back to New York where he was born, and get out of Limerick. As a young boy he is seen picking up spilled coal from the road, impressing the brothers with his essay “Jesus and the Weather,” getting his first job, falling in love and coming home drunk for the first time (“Jesus!” cries his mother. “It’s your father you’ve become!”).

Parker and production designer Geoffrey Kirkland convincingly re-create the grim poverty of the lane in Limerick where the family lived most of the time; although Parker has an unfortunate fondness for a shot in which Frank and Malachy splash deliberately through every puddle they can find, indoors and out, season after season and year after year wouldn’t you eventually learn to keep your feet dry? And while we know from the book that the flooded downstairs was “Ireland” and upstairs was “Italy,” were these people so utterly without resources that they couldn’t have found a plank somewhere to make a bridge from the door to the stairs?

What’s great about “Angela’s Ashes” is Emily Watson’s performance, along with other roles that are perfectly cast. She has exactly that bitterness mixed with resignation that is forced on a woman in a country where marrying a drunk means resigning yourself to it for life: It would be worse sinning against him by letting him starve her children than leaving him. Dad goes off at one point to seek work in England, complaining that she has “refused her wifely duties”; of course his husbandly duties consisted of buying rounds like a big shot down at the pub while fathering more children for them all to starve.

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