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01/21/00: Posted by: cfloser@cyberrealm.net (CreepFreakLoser)
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Of course, technically Ireland was already a pseudo-socialist government during the depression, and it didn't seem to help these unfortunate people out too much.
This movie was 2 1/2 consecutive hours of pure depression. It was ridiculous -- death, starvation, death, drunken stupor, death, classmate ridicule, death, death, death, death, death! It got to the point where I just didn't even give a damn anymore (which is not unlike my own life, as I've had probably far more deaths of close relatives and friends those most any two Crankylanders combined, a good dozen occuring in the same year 1991-1992, and with the last one of that bunch, I just literally stopped caring. I had no more tears to cry. My mother called me earlier this year and told me my brother's former best friend and a few of our classmates had been killed in a car accident. I said "That's too bad," hung up and went to work. Despite the fact that this guy used to practically live in our house, I really haven't thought much about it. Basically people in my hometown have been dead to me for years anyway.)
And somehow that 30 seconds of "happiness" at the end of this film was supposed to make up for all that horrible depression. That had to be the most anti-climatic ending of the year, even more so than "The Straight Story." Seriously, despite the fact that I had already sat still for 145 minutes, I was looking for 15-20 minutes more to tie up all those loose ends or at least give me some sort of drawn out sense of closure. Instead there's just a violent upswing of "happiness" at the very end.
If you're thinking about killing yourself, this movie can have one of two effects on you: It can make you so miserable that it will push you over the edge, or it can make you realize there have been people in far, FAR worse scenarios than you and somehow made it to the "promised land." It had the first effect on me, simply because the ending was too screwed up for me to go "HURRAH, HE MADE IT!" (don't take this too literally, tcp)
"Emily Watson deserves the Oscar for Angela's Ashes!" people are screaming. Why? She showed no range whatsoever in this movie. All she did was appear miserable for 2 1/2 hours. Hell, I appear miserable 24 hours a day and nobody's offering me an Oscar! If she gets an Oscar nomination (which she probably will), it'll be because she's Emily Watson, not because this was the performance to end all performances. Robert Carlyle was just okay, but the most impressive actor in the film was the first little guy to play Francis. One of the better child performances in recent years.
For anyone who's read the book or saw something I missed in the movie: Why is this thing called "Angela's Ashes"? That's really why I was stunned when the credits rolled -- she wasn't dead and cremated yet! I can't say the ending was predictable for that reason -- I thought for sure we'd have at least one more death and in the last scene the kids would be spreading her ashes across the ocean or something. Instead the only ashes I saw in this movie related to Angela came from her cigarettes and the stove.
My final warning: You need to stay far, FAR away from this movie if you don't like continuously downbeat storylines. There's very little comic relief, too. It's mostly just a plague of misery. But, unlike "Leaving Las Vegas," "Affliction" and "Midnight Cowboy," it's nothing you haven't already seen before, which is what makes those depressing flicks different and superior, in my opinion. You've seen one "we're starving kids with no money or food and our classmates pick on us because we have no shoes and our daddy is an alcoholic and we live during the Great Depression" movie, you've seen 'em all. This one just takes it to a new level.
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