Word: offing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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The 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...
The director, Alan Parker, worked with Laura Jones to write the screenplay, and the film is 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...
So the 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...
Frankie McCourt himself is portrayed by three actors: 8-year-old Joe Breen, 13-year-old Ciaran Owens and 19-year-old Michael Legge. Sadly, only Breen manages to capture the essence of Frankie and the "odd look" he gets from his good-for-nothing, "North of Ireland, Presbyterian" father...
The messy story-telling and poor characterization in the film are aptly capped off by the worst instrumental soundtrack since Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet. One would expect at least a few traditional Irish folk songs, or instrumentals of a somewhat Irish tone; unfortunately, all we get is sweeping orchestral muck...