Verdict: This finely made adaptation of the popular memoir is almost too stately for its own good.

Details: Starring Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle. Rated R for sexual content and language. 2 hours, 26 minutes.

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Review: "Angela's Ashes" is so proudly, relentlessly wet that you may need a raincoat just to watch it.

In his best-selling memoir, Frank McCourt detailed his dirt-poor childhood in Ireland with intimacy and sly humor. The movie version stays faithful to the book's details, but it is epic-scaled and somber. It proclaims its seriousness by giving us five different scenes of people vomiting.

The movie begins in New York, where Irish immigrant Angela (Emily Watson) is struggling to feed her many sons. Her pint-loving husband Malachy (Robert Carlyle) tends to go out "for cigarettes" and fail to come back for several days. After a series of infant deaths almost send Angela around the bend, her family in Ireland sends them tickets home to the old country. Where things only get worse.

Because it starts on such a grim note, the movie doesn't have much room to build dramatically. It's not a story about a family descending into unexpected hardship. Rather, it's a catalog of travails that are distinguished mainly by their variety: hunger, illness, alcoholism, typhoid, flooded floors, mattresses peppered with fleas and sheep's heads served for dinner. It has its upbeat moments: young Frank's skipping his dance lessons and having to fake a few jigs for his family, or his discovery of language and writing. But mostly it's a series of visits to the welfare line.

Fans of the book will enjoy seeing their favorite parts recreated on-screen. Others, who don't have the memory of McCourt's lyrical prose whispering in their heads, might wonder what the fuss is all about.

Director Alan Parker ("Evita") has never been a subtle filmmaker. Look at "Midnight Express" or "Fame." Even his previous foray to Ireland, "The Commitments," turned the story of a small, scrappy band into a long music video. Parker leans on many of his old tricks in "Angela's Ashes." He lights the squalor quite beautifully, giving even the rainiest scene a pearly luster. But the emotional mood never changes much.

A better choice of director might have been Ireland's own Neil Jordan. But you could say that he's already made this movie, in a way: his film of childhood torment and madness, the mesmerizing "The Butcher Boy."

As Angela, Watson gives the movie its emotional core. She suffers beautifully, but the role is too saintly to tap the wilder acting skills she brought to "Breaking the Waves" and "Hilary and Jackie." Carlyle manages to make his drunken da' oddly sympathetic, keeping the role from caricature. Unfortunately, he disappears long before the final credits, and the movie suffers from losing his energy.

As for the three boys (Joe Breen, Ciaran Owens and Michael Legge) who play Frank at 8, 13 and as a young adult, they're fine. But you can't help noticing how little they resemble one another, even though they play the same person.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service

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