Angela's Ashes (1999) review

This adaptation of Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir - which is narrated by Andrew Bennett - shows him (played by Joe Breen, Ciaran Owens and Michael Legge at various ages) being born in Brooklyn but having to move back to Ireland with his mother Angela (Emily Watson), out-of-work booze-bag father Malachy (Robert Carlyle) and siblings where they settle in Limerick, but matters don't improve at all: they're starving, some brothers die (a sister passed away in New York City earlier), the first floor of the place they live in is perpetually flooded, Malachy lands a job in London but eventually disappears forever and then Frank has to find a way to make money (but dreams of returning to the United States).  I'm guessing it didn't do well at the box office because of mediocre reviews and the punishingly grim presentation - with the Biblical rains, torn clothing, mud-caked skin, stink of human waste, etc. - in which nothing ever seems to go right, but I found it to be a rather compelling (if sporadically exhausting) depiction of resilience in the face of poverty - Parker's "swapping" out different actors to represent Frank's "maturation" is well-handled, and his scenes with terminally-ill Theresa (Kerry Condon, in her feature debut), albeit brief, are sweetly tragic.  What isn't directly stated is how these ghastly life events inspired a love of literature which led to him taking up teaching as a (thankless and horribly compensated) profession - in a 2005 article on him in the Los Angeles Times, Hillel Italie writes, "on the good days, and there were many, [McCourt] never felt so alive, caught up in the currents of adolescent energy."  For those of us that have spent time in the field, that's the reward.