Anjelica Huston's dark features, broad physique, and flat, unaffected line readings have given her an imposing screen presence, and she possesses a toughness that reflects the maverick reputation of her father, the late director John Huston. She's drawn to similar types behind the camera, too—the Southern women who combat physical and sexual abuse in Bastard Out Of Carolina and the coarse, determined Irish mother in Agnes Browne—but she has yet to fully animate the world and characters surrounding them. Taken from Brendan O'Carroll's seriocomic radio vignettes (which later formed the basis of a popular memoir called The Mammy), Agnes Browne is a stale, shapeless assemblage of ribald humor and standard-issue Irish melodrama, propped up only by Huston's guileless performance in the title role. At once salty and saintly, she plays a recently widowed mother to seven children in 1967 Dublin. Unable to wrest a widow's pension from social services, she borrows money from shady loan shark Ray Winstone to pay for her husband's funeral and uses her meager wages manning a fruit cart to make ends meet. But a couple of characters serve to lighten the heavy mood, including Marion O'Dwyer as her too-cute best friend (there's a running joke about her first "organism") and Arno Chevrier as a burly French suitor. While Huston the actress is capable and modestly affecting in the lead, Huston the director is oppressively dull, lacking the dramatic imagination needed to push across the film's disjointed subplots and quirky bits of humor. In a cultural climate already choked with Irish memoirs, Agnes Browne is especially trite and forgettable.