Agnes Browne

Agnes Browne

Agnes Browne is an Irish woman with six sons and a daughter whose husband just died at 4:10 this afternoon, telling the civil servant who wants to see a certificate before paying the poor man’s death benefits what she thinks of him. She doesn’t make much money with her fruit cart in street markets, but she has her pride and her friends, and all her children are wearing matching sweaters at the funeral even if they match because they all came from the same charity.

Agnes (Anjelica Huston) is like Angela McCourt’s lucky twin sister in “Angela’s Ashes.” Things are bad, but not hopeless, and at least there isn’t a drunken husband around (one of her youngest boys holds two oranges up to his eyes at the funeral). Her best friend is Marion (Marion O’Dwyer), who has the next cart down, and if Agnes isn’t very bright, she’s shrewd enough.

It may seem odd for Huston to play this character, or to direct “Agnes Browne,” until you consider that during Huston’s childhood her father, director John Huston, maintained a country house (more like a castle) in Ireland; she grew up feeling as Irish as American. The accent is fine; so is the attention to detail not the realistic details of “Angela’s Ashes,” but rather the pop-fiction details of what amounts to a warmhearted soap opera.

If this were one of those British movies about working-class life that always wins awards for its cast members (although never for its directors or screenplay), Mister Billy would have been played by Ray Winstone. An actor so skilled at being mean that two of England’s finest actors ever made their debuts casting him as an abusive father: Tim Roth (“The War Zone”) and Gary Oldman (“Nil by Mouth”). Mister Billy is the neighborhood loan shark, a guy who gives you money and expects you to pay him interest for the rest of your life.

Agnes has to borrow from him in order to have her husband buried, and when she can pay him back all at once, his eyes narrow with disappointment. When her son Frankie needs tools for his trade, Mister Billy shows up with another loan and darker intentions.

Some days are sunny, some overcast in Agnes’ life. She’s flattered to be asked on a date by the French baker Pierre (Arno Chevrier), and saddened when Marion receives bad news about a medical exam. And always in the back of her mind there’s a dream; modestly worded, it’s just that she wants to meet Tom Jones. Whether she marries Pierre or meets Jones or what happens to Marion or how Frankie’s loan turns out I’ll leave for you.

This is a small movie and Huston is a charming heroine. But it’s slight material I don’t know why Huston was attracted to it; her first film as director was “Bastard Out of Carolina” (1996), about child abuse, very much fiercer and stronger than this one not consequential enough for me to urge you toward theaters but on video it’s not a bad idea.

Watch Agnes Browne For Free On Gomovies.