The screen turns a rainy gray-blue-green for a more than 2 hour bittersweet remembrance of an impoverished Irish upbringing. As with many Irish stories of childhood travail, irony and humor abound to brighten the gloom. This Alan Parker adaptation of Frank McCourt’s best selling autobiography won high praise from the book’s author for its faithful adaptation.

The story opens in New York where the family is struggling to survive Angela’s near catatonic depression after the death of a baby girl. Angela (Emily Watson) and Dad (Robert Carlyle) are then forced to take young Frank and three younger brothers back to Limerick where Angela's family might help them pull through.  Dad, who is charming with his stories and entertainments, is out of work and not much of a help.

The movie explores the grinding realities of poverty and bigotry suffered by the working class barely surviving in urban squalor where sewage is emptied in buckets outside the family’s door, and babies die in the bed the entire family shares. In this dismal scene, Angela has no options but to keep making babies while her husband, though subject to the whims of a desperate economy and limited ability, is as much plagued by his alcoholism and ne’er-do-well attitude. Could there be a more powerful argument for birth control and women being educated and given a skill so that they need not become dependent on men for support in an endless cycle of birth and infant death? Amazingly, Angela, Frank, and his brothers maintain sympathy for the old man. The resentment beneath the surface never fully erupts.

Frank’s life vision unfolds with a sense of hope that gives the film a lighter note. There are some hilarious and touching moments when Frank is inspired by instructors to promote his mind and fight for his place in school, and ultimately to escape back to America. There is the expected scene of the first sexual love, masturbation, and guilt. Some churchmen are cast in a negative light while others patiently hear confessions and in the end save Frank from tearing apart spiritually and psychologically. The most evil character, though, is a grotesque cousin who eats in front of the near starving children and satisfies his lust with Angela as payment for their keep, as degrading and inferior as it is.

The heart of this film is its patience in showing a family hang in there despite the pressures from its sinful members, the clucking extended relatives, the judging society, and economic hard times grinding away at its core.