Word: angela
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...Angela's Ashes...
Readers of Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller, Angela's Ashes, may have wondered from whence the title of the book came. Upon seeing the film, it becomes clear that the title refers to the ashes that grow on the end of the cigarettes that Angela, McCourt's mother, smokes continuously as she worries her way through poverty, saddled with several children and an alcoholic husband who can't seem to hold...
...film opens with a scene of squalor in the McCourt household in 1935. Angela has just given birth to her first daughter, adding to her family of four sons. Shortly afterward, the daughter dies. Unfortunately the viewer doesn't have time to care whether the infant lives or dies, thus revealing the first of many flaws in the film: in adapting the book to film, the filmmakers tried to cram as much of the book as possible into a two-hour movie, and this simply doesn't work...
...very faithful to the book--too faithful, perhaps. Like a complex organ hymn being plinked out on an electric keyboard, the film plays the same basic melody as the memoir but fails to bring out the nuances of McCourt's writing, while these nuances are precisely what made Angela's Ashes a great work rather than a mere string of anecdotes...
...film runs glumly along, episode after episode, with no plot whatsoever. Frank's siblings die at the rate of about one every ten minutes, but the only emotion these deaths manage to evoke is indifference. Along the way the film manages to completely squander Emily Watson as Angela. She makes a valiant effort to portray Angela as a tough woman who's not too proud to beg for her children, but wasted are her sharp, delicate eyes and wonderfully expressive mouth. In fact, the occasional, accidental spurts of beautiful acting she is allowed only serve to frustrate the viewer even...