In the early 1930s, when Irish families were migrating to America by the thousand, the McCourt family come back to Ireland after trying unsuccessfully to make a success in America - they settle in Limerick, where Dad, Robert Carlyle, who came originally from Belfast, finds getting work daunting - of course it doesn`t help that he was a drunk and a wastrel. Somehow his wife, Angela, Emily Watson, keeps the family together...
Frank McCourt`s much loved novel successfully combined bitter humour with a grimly realistic depiction of a world of impoverishment and poverty. Alan Parker`s film has contains most of what was in the book: the rain-swept streets, the filthy rooms, the hopelessness, the gallows humour. There are distinguished performances from Robert Carlyle and, especially, Emily Watson, from the well directed children, and from Ronnie Masterson as Grannie Sheehan, a wizened old Catholic who strongly disapproves of Dad.
But somehow Parker misses the emotional punch the material needed: there`s an academic feel to the film which keeps the audience slightly at bay. If only John Ford had still been around - this would have been the perfect project for the Irish director who loved films about mothers and who made that classic about poverty, The Grapes Of Wrath
