Reaping the Blessings of Misfortune

It may be imagination playing tricks, but the air feels distinctly damp. Walk along an uneven cobbled street lined by a row of dismal little houses, and a chill both literal and metaphorical hits you.

Inside one of these miserable dwellings you’re struck by the desperate poverty of anyone condemned to live here. Damp brick walls are thinly coated by a faint, greenish slime. On the floors are ragged lengths of linoleum. In the center of a living room, a rickety wooden table is covered by a 1938 edition of the Limerick Leader, an Irish newspaper. Images of the Virgin Mary adorn each wall. Flimsy drapes sag at the windows.

Fortunately, no one lives here; these houses are built specifically for a film. And they’re not even in Limerick, a port city of western Ireland. Instead they’ve been constructed off a quiet side street, a block away from the Liffey, the river that flows through Dublin, currently one of Europe’s most booming cities.

Yet people did live in such grinding poverty in Limerick in the 1930s. One was writer Frank McCourt, who grew up in the infamous “Lanes” of which these houses are replicas. He emigrated to America at 19, spent his adult life teaching in the New York public school system, and after his retirement wrote a memoir of his childhood. It was called “Angela’s Ashes,” and it became one of the publishing events of the ‘90s.

In the book, McCourt unflinchingly describes his poor family’s tragedies (including the death of infant siblings) and his feckless father’s alcoholism, interspersing this grim material with passages of surprising, clear-eyed humor. (For example, McCourt notes in his memoir that churches were the only dry places in his native city: “Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain.”)

“Angela’s Ashes” sold more than 4 million copies worldwide, and in 1997 won the Pulitzer Prize and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. McCourt’s harrowing memoir is now being brought to the screen by British director Alan Parker. The coveted title role (Angela was McCourt’s mother) went to Emily Watson, an Oscar nominee for 1996’s “Breaking the Waves,” and acclaimed for her portrayal of Jacqueline du Pre in “Hilary and Jackie.” Watson, who is English, last played an Irish character opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in the 1997 film “The Boxer.”

The other major adult role, McCourt’s irresponsible father, was taken by Scottish actor Robert Carlyle, the slight, sly leader of the would-be male strippers in “The Full Monty.”

McCourt and his younger brother Malachy are each played, from ages 4 to 16, by a trio of young Irish actors. Because of the nature of the story, Watson finds herself holding babies in her arms for much of the film: “My arms are aching so much,” she said with a sigh at the end of one arduous shooting day. “But then again it’s great for an actress, because my job is seeing to the children. It gives me something to do on screen. That’s what the part is about. That was [Angela’s] life.”

Yet Carlyle, whose dark hair has been cut extremely short at the back and sides, giving him a vulnerable, boyish look, predicts the film will not be as bleak as it sounds on paper.

“It’s not the happiest piece,” he said. “But one of the many things Alan’s done right is to ensure there’s a degree of humor in the story, because it would be pretty relentless otherwise. It would be easy to go down the road of deaths and misery and not leave much time for anything else. But it’s a very uplifting story in many ways. There’s a triumph in it.”

Parker said this was his approach as well: “Frank’s book was funny, so I’ve tried to make the film funny. It’s a tragic story, but if it’s not funny too, there’s no point in making it. Frank has an ability to tell you something sad and make you laugh as well. If we don’t do that in the film, we’ll fail.”

Parker has a famously caustic demeanor and is not a man to hide his anxieties or to play cheerleader for a film by expressing upbeat banalities about it--at least not while it is being shot.

“Just because 4 million people bought the book, that doesn’t mean it will automatically be a successful film,” he said. “We need to get it right too.”

The film, which Parker said had a budget of between $25 million and $30 million, is being jointly financed by Paramount and PolyGram. Parker tried to buy the film rights to “Angela’s Ashes” around the time it was published in 1996, only to find he was beaten to the punch by producers Scott Rudin and David Brown. (The two men found they were competing for the rights and decided to collaborate.)

“I thought, ‘Well, that’s all right, I’m the only director who can make this movie,’ ” said Parker, recalling his discovery of Rudin’s and Brown’s involvement. “But a year later, I clearly wasn’t. They had obviously asked other people.”

These included Robert Zemeckis and Mel Gibson; at one stage the plan was for Gibson to direct and play McCourt’s father. “For a long time, I gather, it was tied up because Mel wouldn’t commit to Scott,” Parker said. “When [Rudin] finally called, I said, ‘Scott, what took you so long?’ ”

But that’s just the start of the story.

Rudin had a script for “Angela’s Ashes,” written by Laura Jones (“Portrait of a Lady,” “A Thousand Acres”). “The first thing I did was to rewrite her,” Parker said brusquely. “I’m a director who writes, so I rewrote completely.”

“The clues are all in the book,” he added. “Everything comes from Frank. There are about 4,000 scenes in the book. In the film there can only be a smattering. [In the shooting script, there are 348.] You just look at things that had been ignored when I got this screenplay.” (Writing credits are likely to go to arbitration.)

Casting had its complications as well. Parker said he and Rudin discussed Watson “very early on. We didn’t disagree.” When Watson met Parker, they ended up talking about soccer; both are fervent fans of the North London team Arsenal. “That just about clinched it,” Watson said dryly.

But Carlyle was not the first name to be discussed for the role of McCourt’s father. “There was studio pressure to have Liam Neeson, who’s from the north [of Ireland], like his character,” Parker said. But Neeson withdrew from contention, partly for financial reasons and partly because his character drops out of the film two-thirds of the way through.

“After that, it was always Bobby,” Parker said. “He’s terrific. He’s so humble. That’s true of him and Emily. The work’s not really about themselves. Half the time Emily has to worry about the children on her knee. She’s a mother with screaming babies. They’re heavy, they’re awkward, they cry. But she still gets her lines out.

“And Emily and Bobby don’t even have children. What’s wonderful is, I’ve watched them both become a mother and father.” He smiled wryly. “I’m sure within the year they’ll become pregnant in some way. This morning Bobby was doing one of the film’s opening scenes. He said, ‘Look at this!’ He had a 3-week-old baby on his arm. He was so carried away. He was so besotted by the reality of the situation.”

Later, Carlyle sheepishly agreed he felt overwhelmed by the scene. “Aye, they brought the baby in, 3 weeks old, and I just melted with this gorgeous kid, fell in love with her,” he said. “In the afternoon, we shot a scene where the baby has died. They used a doll made up to look dead. But it frightened me. I couldn’t help but see the wee kid’s face, hold that reality in my hands.”

As for the child actors hired to play Frank and Malachy at various ages, everyone agrees they’ve been outstanding--sometimes almost frighteningly so.

“We hired an actor in one role, and he simply couldn’t get a word out in front of these kids,” Parker recalled. “We hired a replacement, and he kept getting his lines wrong. And Joe Breen, who plays Frank at age 6, told him: ‘No, your line goes. . . .’ Because he’d remembered all the lines.”

Little Breen has become quite an on-set legend. “Joe is 6, and he’s lived on a farm all his life,” Watson said. “But he’s never at a loss for words. . . . In one scene he’s sitting at a table eating soup, which he didn’t like much. So he said to Alan: ‘Do I really have to eat my soup in this scene?’ Alan said he didn’t. And Joe said, ‘Ah, Alan Parker, you’re the best director I ever worked with!’ Cracked us all up.”

If the cast and crew have sometimes found filming “Angela’s Ashes” emotional and harrowing, their feelings are nothing compared to those of a mild-mannered, white-haired man who has visited the set in Dublin and the exterior scenes shot in Limerick. This is Frank McCourt, who has been undergoing the bizarre experience of watching episodes from his early, poverty-stricken life reenacted for the camera.

The author has made a point of not talking at great length about his reactions to the film with its principals. On-set observers have noticed him walking quietly away from a scene, his eyes brimming with tears. But McCourt agreed to share some of his thoughts about the filming and settled down in the cozy saloon bar of a Dublin city center hotel for a long afternoon’s talk, during which he slowly nursed two glasses of Irish whiskey.

“It’s a strange feeling,” he said. “I was here a few weeks ago, when they started shooting in an old school named St. Kevin’s. I went there for a few minutes. I didn’t want to intrude. I didn’t feel comfortable, and I felt less comfortable when I saw what it did to me.

“The headmaster of my real old school, Mr. O’Halloran, has four sons here in Dublin. They had some of the maps and charts that were on the classroom walls, and they supplied them to the movie.” McCourt said and smiled. “It was deja vu all over again. These urchins come in, barefoot, shaved heads, raggedy clothes. And it was weird.

“They shot the scene, but I felt strange. I left. I had to go and have a pint with Emily Watson and my wife. I was jolted into the past, it was so authentic what they did with that classroom. I expected that school master to turn on me at any minute with the stick.”

Still, McCourt also found moments of comedy in the situation: “The best part was when Alan Parker turned to Joe Breen. . . . Joe’s like I was--he glares, he doesn’t smile at all. Alan says, ‘You see that man over there, that’s Mr. McCourt. That’s what you’re going to look like when you grow up!’ Joe wasn’t a bit happy with that.”

McCourt is delighted Parker is directing “Angela’s Ashes”: “I’d seen ‘The Commitments,’ which I liked a lot, and I know from ‘Fame’ and ‘Bugsy Malone’ how well he works with kids. At one point Scott Rudin asked me to call Alan. He said to me: ‘Every film takes 18 months of your life.’ I said: ‘Alan, consider this: If the film comes out in 1999, you could be the director who wins an Academy Award in the year 2000. Why not start a new century with an Oscar under your belt?’ I don’t think it swayed him, but it made him chuckle.” (The film is scheduled to be released in the fall).

With Carlyle and Watson, McCourt apparently avoided the subject of what his parents were really like. “Emily said to me, ‘Don’t you have something you want to say to me?’ But I didn’t. We talked in general terms, but we didn’t get close to the bone or anything. What’s the use?

“And Robert Carlyle is brilliant. He has what I say about my father in the book--the odd manner. He has that edge my father had, that sense of danger.”

“I didn’t want to ask Frank a lot about his father,” Carlyle said. “Acting is about interpretation and characterization. I felt that to listen too intently about what the guy was like would be wrong. It could just become mimicry. But I also thought it would be wrong to make him the villain of the piece. He did stupid things, but he loved his kids and they loved him. And a lot of Frank’s storytelling ability had to come from his father.”

Not everyone in Ireland is thrilled about McCourt’s book or its adaptation to film. In Limerick, various religious orders refused permission to film inside their churches, and some residents claim McCourt’s family was never as poor as the book describes.

“They tried to get inside the Redemptionist church, but they wouldn’t let them in,” McCourt said. “Same thing happened at St. Joseph’s, my old parish church. The Franciscans agreed, but then the bishop of Limerick said no. So they found some church just outside Dublin run by an order of priests called the Oblate Fathers, and used it with the proviso that when the credits roll, they’ll say where it was shot, but that the priests don’t necessarily agree with the film’s contents.”

In Limerick, he added, most opposition has come from an older generation: “Limerick has had a bad image anyway, because it used to be such a dreary city, so they’re sensitive. But there are people there who deny these conditions ever existed. They’ll say, ‘Oh no, there was no such thing as a slum where a dozen people shared a lavatory.’

“Then there’s another breed of people in Ireland we call ‘begrudgers,’ who don’t ever want to see anyone else successful.”

The question has arisen about how much of “Angela’s Ashes” is literally true; McCourt calls it a memoir, not an autobiography. Parker has no qualms: “It’s simply a wonderful story,” he said. Carlyle added: “Frank’s life has a reality, the way he lived it. Frank’s book has a different reality.”

And McCourt still seems slightly dazed by the fame the book has suddenly brought him in his mid-60s: “I’m flattered,” he said. “And I’m surprised--amazed really--that anyone would want to make a movie about a slum in Limerick.”