Angela's Ashes (5 Stars)

True Stories #13

Name: Frank McCourt

Lived: 19 August 1930 – 19 July 2009

Film dates: 1935 to 1949

Film made in 1997

In 1996 the Irish American author Frank McCourt wrote an autobiography of his early years in Ireland. It was hugely popular with critics and the general public. Notably, it started a new literature genre: the misery memoir. Despite the happy ending – Frank returning to America – the autobiography is a string of one unhappy event after another. In fact, the situations and events that he portrays are so miserable that he was accused of exaggerating his childhood misery. He denied these accusations.

I haven't read the book, but I've read a brief summary, and it seems like the film closely follows the book, with the exception of a blunder at the end. Frank McCourt returned to America in 1949, but a calendar on the wall of the travel agent where he buys his ticket says it's 1946. Yes, I'm pedantic enough to notice things like that!

The film begins in Brooklyn, New York. Frank is the oldest of five children. The misery begins almost immediately. Three minutes into the film Frank's sister Margaret dies. His father leaves the apartment to go on a drinking binge. His mother Angela suffers from depression and can't get out of bed. The remaining children have no food and run around the house naked and hungry. This is the impetus for the family to return to Ireland, where Angela's family can help to take care of them.

They move into a house in Limerick where the ground floor is flooded after every rainfall. Frank's twin brothers die within the next 20 minutes of the film. The whole of the film shows the family fighting with hunger and poverty. It also shows Frank's religious development. He grows up as a strict Catholic, the same as all young boys in Ireland in the first half of the 20th Century. He does many things that he knows to be wrong, but he feels guilty and regrets them.

One of Frank's reasons to feel guilt is that he paid Peter Dooley for the privilege of peeking through the window when his sisters were taking a bath. Only a shilling. What a bargain!

It's only today that I realised this is part of the misery story. Frank visited Peter's house with two friends and paid to see the girls, but the first boy to look through the window made a noise, and they were chased off. Frank never got to see the naked breasts. Poor Frank paid for nothing.

Something that's dreadful is the Irish bigotry. Frank's father comes from Northern Ireland, or as they call it, "the North of Ireland". He's a Catholic, but they still criticise him for his place of origin. They repeatedly refer to him as a Protestant, even though he was a Catholic who had fought for the IRA. (Note: in the film nobody believes that he'd been in the IRA, but recently uncovered records reveal that it's true). The idea that all northern Irish are Protestants is bigotry, nothing less.

That's not to say that Frank's father was a good man. He was an alcoholic all his life. However hungry his family was, he spent the little money that he had on beer and whiskey. This put young Frank in a dilemma. He loved his father, but he hated his father's drinking.

Frank's father walked out on a Christmas Day and never came back. The autobiography was named after his mother, but the main emphasis of the film is Frank's relationship with his father. I can understand how a son can love his father regardless of his faults. My own father was a very complicated man. In most ways he was a very good man, but he was emotionally cold. This coldness hurt me a lot when I was growing up, but now that he's dead I only think about his positive traits.

The three Franks

The film is excellent. There are stunning performances by Robert Carlyle and Emily Watson as the parents, as well as the three actors who play the part of Frank McCourt. I don't understand why the film wasn't a box office success, especially after the book's commercial success.

Success Rate:  - 1.9

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