Grade: C

Verdict: Pure blarney.

Details: Starring Anjelica Huston and Marion O'Dwyer. Rated R for language. 1 hour, 32 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: Treating Irish culture like a theme park, the makers of "Agnes Browne" never miss a chance to smear local "color" on the screen. We get beery pub sing-alongs, a soundtrack reeling with pipes and fiddles, and that overly familiar icon, the noble, working-class mum raising a passel of kids by her lonesome.

No, her name isn't Angela (of the ashes), but Agnes, natch, played by Anjelica Huston, who also directed. With her husband newly dead at the start of the movie, Agnes borrows funeral money from local loan shark Mr. Billy (Ray Winstone). He's the kind of guy who likes to corrupt the neighborhood children and keep their families under his thumb. But Agnes never lets anything keep her down for long. Maybe that's because the light in her brain is closer to a Christmas bulb than a halogen tube.

At the funeral, she coos, "Isn't this grand?" When multiple mourning processions gridlock in the cemetery afterward, she shouts, "Follow the one on your right, kids, that's your father!" Actually it isn't, and mixed-up coffins is the kind of comedy this movie traffics in.

That might be fine if "Agnes Browne" were intended to be a sly parody, upending the conventions of Irish family dramas. But it's actually just more of the same. Agnes says things like "We're the Brownes — we stick together." Och! Her adorable children even pitch in to buy her a dress for her date with the courtly French baker (Arno Chevrier) who eyes her at the open market, where she sells fruits and veggies.

Agnes spends most of her time there gossiping with friend Marion (Marion O'Dwyer), who has the distinction of being possibly even more stupid than Agnes. Example: She marches into church every morning and announces, "Morning, God, it's me, Marion." When the Almighty fails to appear and hand her a cup of tea, she seems put out. She's the one who tells Agnes about having "organisms" during sex. Aren't these Irish lasses a riot?

A series of manufactured emotions, the movie kills off one of the characters in an attempt to wring tears, then tries to give us a zany upbeat ending with an appearance by singer Tom Jones, a swingin' deus ex machina who saves Agnes from a financial crisis. Sheesh.

You can understand Huston's urge to give herself a big screen role. She's at an age when they dry up for women. But it's a shame to see her fall into a typical actor trap, the need to prove some sort of artistic integrity by playing one of the world's "little people." It's a type of slumming that squanders her considerable talent and condescends to the characters. By the end of the flick, you're convinced that the true Irish spirit is a mixture of stupidity and blind luck.

"Agnes Browne" isn't a total disaster. It's just a wasted opportunity, a mediocre time killer. You might like it if your hair is of a particular blue tint or you thought the twee adventures of "Tea With Mussolini" were fabulous.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service

[an error occurred while processing this directive]