When he was 6 years old, Frank McCourt sneaked into the movies for the first time and found joyous escape from the desperate poverty of the Dickensian early years he captured so vividly in “Angela’s Ashes.”
Screaming and stamping his feet with the other urchins in Limerick’s dingy Lyric Theater, he watched the gangsters with guns blazing in “The Public Enemy.”
“We’d come out of the cinema swaggering and shooting like Cagney,” remembered McCourt. “I never thought I’d see the day when my own life would end up on a movie screen.”
Despite the acclaim that has greeted “Angela’s Ashes” since its publication just over three years ago, more than a few people in Hollywood share McCourt’s incredulity. How do you translate the special voice and humor that make the miseries of his childhood moving in the retelling? How do you keep the movie from turning into a maudlin parade of unrelieved woe?
As McCourt confessed, “I never thought (the book) was cinematic when I was writing it.”
Luckily for filmgoers, Alan Parker begged to differ.
“I always thought of it as very cinematic,” said the director, whose resume is strewn with such intractable projects as “Bugsy Malone,” “Midnight Express” and “Evita.” “To me the real question was how I was going to do a book that was this famous.
“. . . Everyone who’s read it has their own idea and image in their heads. The beauty of the writing is what makes the work cinematic. But if you include everything that’s in the book, you’re going to end up with a four-hour film, (and) whatever you cut is going to make somebody mad.”
The number of people who have read McCourt’s literate memoir and have their own idea of how it should play out on the screen is staggering. “Angela’s Ashes” spent 117 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. There are 2.3 million hardcover copies in print in North America alone, and the book has been published in 18 other languages. McCourt’s sequel, “‘Tis: A Memoir,” which traces his later years in New York, is a current best-seller. For McCourt, now 67 and retired as a New York high-school teacher, the poverty of his boyhood has ensured that his golden years will, indeed, be just that.
Parker, who knew hard times of his own growing up in the grubby working-class neighborhood of North London after World War II, said the roadblocks he encountered in shooting “Angela’s Ashes” were of a more practical sort.
The Catholic Church in Ireland, which comes in for stinging criticism in the memoir, declined to cooperate by lending its buildings. Many in Limerick felt McCourt gave his hometown a black eye by exaggerating his troubles, and weren’t happy to find the $45 million Hollywood production on their doorsteps. And a booming economy has transformed the country: Much of the Ireland of McCourt’s youth just isn’t there anymore.
But Parker says these were minor matters compared to his core problem. He had to find not one, but three Franks to play McCourt as a young child, a 12-year-old, and in his late teens. This required the discovery of natural talent in boys similar enough in looks to pass for the same person.
Then Parker had to repeat the process, this time to cast Frank’s brother Malachy. Then he had to repeat it again and again, for the boys Frank grew up with.
“It’s a casting nightmare. . . . You’ve got to have fantastic kids or it just isn’t going to work,” observed Parker over coffee in a Midtown hotel. “It’s the most important element in the film because everything is going to depend on your sympathy for the character and how much you care about what happens to him. . . . You don’t want anything smarmy or Hollywood.”
Joe Breen, Ciaran Owens and Michael Legge were chosen from a field of 15,000 children to play young, middle and older Frank. Breen, whose haunted face adorns the posters for “Angela’s Ashes,” gave new meaning to the idea of the cattle-call audition. After several interviews, Parker picked the 8-year-old farm boy for the pivotal role of young Frank. Breen still got up to milk the cows on his father’s place in County Wexford each day before arriving on the set.
Parker, who handled his all-child cast with aplomb in “Bugsy Malone,” said he made his choices from hard-earned experience. “You want a child without any veneer or artificiality. You have to find kids with confidence but still unspoiled. Most of all you need that fierce intelligence at work, just like the kid in `The Sixth Sense.’ “
McCourt said he only visited the set of “Angela’s Ashes” a couple of times. Watching the cast play out his childhood was “a surreal experience,” he recalled. “The boys are priceless.”
Parker shot “The Commitments” in Dublin 10 years ago and was unprepared for the changes in Ireland. “Affluence has had a deep effect and I was in shock when I went there to have a look (for locations). What I was trying to film wasn’t there anymore.”
The Lyric Theater where Jimmy Cagney first thrilled young McCourt is now a parking lot. The infamous Lanes, where the McCourts lived next to a communal outhouse in rooms that flooded in winter, are long gone. Parker reconstructed them in Dublin on soundstages so persuasive that you can almost feel the bone-chilling damp.
The film is arranged episodically with Angela and Malachy McCourt, Frank’s parents, movingly played by Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle. Meeting nothing but misfortune in Brooklyn, the McCourts make the tragic mistake of returning to Limerick during the Depression. Their hardships and suffering are compounded by their harsh treatment by priests, social welfare bureaucrats and even their own relatives. Unable to hold a job, Frank’s father drifts into the life of an alcoholic wastrel.
But young Frank is awakened to the beauty of words when he discovers Shakespeare and other poets. Ultimately, he departs for New York, where he will make a life teaching the literature that lifted him from despair.
McCourt has often said that he held off writing his memoir because he couldn’t find the right narrative voice. Eventually, he came up with a brilliant fusion of perspectives in which an old man’s recollections are joined to the observations of a child, who is viewing events largely beyond his control.
Parker, who co-wrote the screen adaptation with Laura Jones, tries to do justice to McCourt’s unique narrative presence with a voice-over by actor Andrew Bennett, who sounds a lot like the real McCourt.
“The magic of his words is something you have to have. It’s not something you can put in the dialogue,” explained Parker. “The beauty of the book is the old schoolteacher looking at life with the innocence of the boy, and I think that’s why so many people have embraced `Angela’s Ashes.’ It’s what they respond to.”
The rueful wit of the older voice was a relief to the author. “The humor is the quality that makes it all bearable,” McCourt said. “If it wasn’t there you’d have endless darkness and despair like a Russian novel. It would be admired for its artistry and nobody would read it. You need the sense of absurdity that Alan brought out in the film.”
Whenever feasible, Parker shot the exterior sequences in Limerick where, he says dryly, “it will be interesting to see how it’s received” later this winter.
Whatever the hometown reaction, it holds no terrors for Parker. His last movie was the intensely controversial — especially in Argentina — “Evita” with Madonna as Eva Peron.
” `Angela’s Ashes’ in Limerick can’t be any worse than the premiere of `Evita’ in Buenos Aires,” he said with a laugh. “I’m a glutton for punishment.”
