Angela’s Ashes

Director/co-scenarist Alan Parker’s adaptation of Frank McCourt’s memoir of a near-catastrophic Irish childhood is neither as funny nor as touching as it should be. With the passing of three of Frankie’s wee siblings in a single reel, we should be made to feel something, but we don’t; with the wealth of wit presented Parker, humor should shine in more than just those McCourtian lines recited verbatim by narrator Andrew Bennett. Parker and Laura Jones’ script fails to illume the interiors of saintly Ma (Emily Watson) or dissolute Da (Robert Carlyle), while the director’s penchant for visual lyricism leads to inappropriate lensings of poverty, prettified.