Cinema: Angela's Ashes

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STARRING: Emily Watson, Robert Carlyle and, as Frank, Joe Breen, Ciaran Owens and Michael Legge DIRECTOR: Alan Parker OPENS: Dec. 25 in N.Y.C. and L.A.; wide in January

No one need bother mocking or pitying the Irish; they do such a good job of it themselves. Frank McCourt beautifully juggled contempt and sympathy in his memoir of growing up poor and wet in Limerick in the '30s and '40s, before squandering the goodwill he had accrued with the taint of 'Tis (it'll be a while before that sour screed is filmed). Parker, who did right by the Irish in The Commitments, has a go at the impossible task of adapting Angela's Ashes and trying to satisfy all those who loved the book so much that McCourt's painful past miraculously became theirs.

The movie, unable to pack in the book's entire accumulation of incident, is necessarily anecdotal. Frank's mother (Watson) has been slightly sanctified, and Dad (Carlyle) given the lilt of Irish laughter to go with his wastrel ways. But the film has the vitality of remembered truth. Is Frank hungry? He licks a newspaper for the residual grease of the chips it held. Is he sopping? He steps in more puddles than Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain. (Ten years the family rented the same flooded ground floor, and no one thought to lay a plank from the doorway to the stairs.) The three boys playing Frank at 7, 11 and 15 are fine. They create a collective portrait of a child tough enough to survive a horrendous youth and a man brave enough to recall it.

--By Richard Corliss