Attempting to adapt Frank McCourt’s beloved bestseller Angela’s Ashes is a heck of an undertaking.  I’m not sure that many filmmakers would be able to pull it off at all, let alone be able to present a decent finished version to the teeming masses that devoured McCourt’s autobiography.  But Alan Parker and his crew show that they were more than up to the challenge, and their bleak and haunting film will certainly satisfy the appetite of Angela’s rabid readers.

Like the book, Ashes starts with the impoverished McCourt family living in a dank, muddy, rain-soaked tenement in New York City.  Unable to make ends meet in the new world, the family high-tails it back to Limerick, Ireland, leaving young five-year-old Frank and his family in the rare position of waving “goodbye” to the Statue of Liberty.  Unfortunately, Limerick was the only place in the world danker, muddier and rainier than New York’s slums.  In fact, the film depicts the housing in New York and Limerick almost identically – old, decaying stone structures threatening to crush the feeble hopes and dreams of anyone that dare enter.

Frank’s parents almost seem like caricatures, with mum Angela (Emily Watson, Cradle Will Rock) barely able to muster enough energy to keep spreading her legs and popping out kids, and dad Malachy (Robert Carlyle, The World is Not Enough), an on-the-dole drunkard that can neither hold down a job nor win the favor of his in-laws that despise the fact he’s a Protestant from Northern Ireland.  Frank starts out as the oldest of four boys, but the McCourts gain and lose kids at such an amazing pace, it’s hard to keep track of the exact number at any given point in the film.  It probably wasn’t until the Kennedys burst on to the scene that a more tragic family existed.

While you’ve probably seen dirt poor ‘30s families portrayed in film before, Ashes kicks it up a couple of notches.  The McCourts are so poor that they don’t have a pot to piss in; they use a bucket.  Their first floor is constantly underwater, and their neighbor’s sewage ran down the drainpipe outside their ramshackle abode.  Each family member is so caked in filth and has so much dirt under their fingernails that you’ll want to go home and scrub your fingers raw while sitting in a steaming hot tub as soon as you get home.

The story follows Frank’s life from age five to sixteen, when he returned to the United States.  In between, he suffered from hunger, typhoid and conjunctivitis.  Frank is played by three different young actors (Joseph Breen, Ciaran Owens and Michael Legge) and each does a fine job looking destitute and downcast.  Watson and Carlyle contribute to the film’s acting pedigree, but the majority of Ashes’ magic occurs behind the camera. 

Although Parker hasn’t made a film since Evita, he shows that he is still one of the most talented directors today.  Parker’s script, which he co-wrote with Oscar and Lucinda’s Laura Jones, does a good job incorporating the major points of  McCourt’s novel into the film without keeping it from getting too out of hand.  Cinematographer Michael Seresin, who worked on Parker’s earlier (and considerably darker) films like Birdy and Angel Heart, and six-time Oscar nominee and longtime Parker editor Gerry Hambling both do an amazing job at creating a very realistic Depression era.  If the poignant images don’t get to you, John William’s score swells in enough of the right places to all but guarantee a lump in your throat.

2:25 – for adult language, some mild adult situations and the realistic portrayal of a dirt-poor family