Angela's Ashes: Frank McCourt's book is better than its 1999 film adaptation

Whenever movie producers such as Mace Neufeld (The Hunt for Red October) or the triumvirate of Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Barrie M. Osborne (The Lord of the Rings) announce that they are going to adapt a literary work for the silver screen, most of us say something like, “That’s great, but I bet it won’t be as good as the book.”

Of course, if you go into screenwriting or even just read books about the process of writing for the film industry, you quickly learn that the business of adaptation isn’t simply changing the original prose format of a book (fiction or non-fiction, it doesn’t matter) into the more concise one used in movie scripts.  Instead, you have to write your screenplay with a keen eye for the visual aspects of the story, as well as making tons of compromises that will allow you to keep thematic ideas from the book close to what the original author intended when he or she wrote the book without giving your producer a screenplay that will result in a very long and expensive movie.

This, obviously, is not something that the average moviegoer knows a lot about, so when a movie such as director John McTiernan’s The Hunt for Red October is released, many of the novel’s fans make comments along the lines of Oh, it was all right and they got some things pretty much like Tom Clancy wrote, but the book is better.”

Thus it’s not surprising that when director/producer Alan Parker (Angel Heart. Evita) adapted Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer-prize winning memoir Angela’s Ashes in 1999, the results were, in a nutshell, underwhelming. 

Written by Laura Jones (Portrait of a Lady) and featuring such actors as Emily Watson, Robert Carlyle, and a trio of young lads (Joe Breen, Ciaran Owens and Michael Legge) who play Frank McCourt at different ages), Angela’s Ashes is a well-meant but ultimately cheerless adaptation of McCourt’s witty and spirited account of his family’s hardscrabble existence in Limerick, Ireland during the Great Depression and the dark days of World War II.

As in the book, Angela’s Ashes begins with the story of the McCourt family’s travails in 1930s Brooklyn.  Frank’s (Breen) father Malachy (Carlyle) is a charming Irish immigrant who tends to drink a lot, talks about fighting in the Irish Republican Army against British rule and loses every job he manages to get.  His long-suffering wife Angela (Watson) alternates between being frustrated with her husband’s bad habits and having babies, many of which don’t live past toddlerhood.

Eventually, Malachy, Sr. and his family reverse-migrate to Limerick in the Republic of Ireland after the death of Frank’s baby sister Margaret.  They end up living in a badly-deteriorated house which tends to flood easily in the damp and rainy environment and is the only house in the block with a toilet.

This is bad enough, but Angela’s husband – who still drinks too much but works very seldom – is discriminated against because he hails from British-ruled Northern Ireland.

As in the book, Angela’s Ashes focuses its attention to young Frankie, who is often picked on for being a “Yank” and thought of as being unworthy of an education until the boy starts exhibiting a sharp mind and a way with the written word.

Forced to assume the role of man-of-the-house by his dad’s irresponsible ways with money, Frank starts working as a young adolescent, all the while dreaming of making his way back to America.

My Take:  On the surface, the movie version of Angela’s Ashes appears to be a faithful – if somewhat abridged – adaptation of McCourt’s popular and critically acclaimed memoir.  The cast – particularly the leading adults and the two trios of actors who play Frank and Malachy, Jr – turns in fine performances, cinematographer Michael Seresin (Angel Heart) captures the visuals of New York City and Limerick well and the score by John Williams reflects the strong influences of Irish folk music in his lovely and evocative themes.

However, although Laura Jones’ screenplay does a good job of depicting the dank, inhospitable and depressing environments in which the McCourts lived on both sides of the Atlantic, Angela’s Ashes lacks the book’s strongest asset, which is Frank McCourt’s light-hearted humor and wit.  Yes, the events in the movie are essentially the same as in the memoir, but Jones and director Parker give us a far darker and sadder narrative in the screen version.

There is also a sense of emotional distance between the viewer and the film’s characters that is absent from the book when you read it.  This is especially true when you listen to the voiceover by actor Andrew Bennett, who is supposedly the adult McCourt in “present day.”

Though I think Bennett is a good voice actor, his line readings seem to be somewhat detached and sound as though he is telling a tale he knows second-hand and not as though he had been Frank McCourt.  He emotes correctly and matches words to image well, but he never quite gives us a true sense of having experienced life in Brooklyn or Limerick with Angela, Malachy and the rest of the McCourt clan.

Recommended: Yes