Small Things Like These: Drama About Morality, Responsibility Soars On Cillian Murphy
By Karen Gordon
Rating: B+
Cillian Murphy follows up his Oscar-winning role in the epic Oppenheimer with another brilliant performance in a much smaller and more intimate film, but one that also deals with questions about morality and responsibility.
Small Things Like These — based on the Booker short-listed novel by Claire Keegan and adapted for the screen by Enda Walsh — is a character study of its lead character, wrapped around the story of the Magdalene schools.
It is also about the hold that the Catholic church had on communities in Ireland. All that is wrapped around a character study of a man with inner burdens and psychic wounds he can no longer contain.
That man, Murphy’s character, is Bill Furlong, a quiet, careful man who lives with his wife Eileen (Eileen Walsh) and their five daughters in the small Irish town of New Ross in County Wexford. The family home is small, cramped, but also warm, loving, and joyful.
Furlong has his own small business. He’s a coal merchant, enough to support his family, but hardly lucrative. The family is preparing for the Christmas season, and we get the sense that money is tight. And relationships with the local community are important.
One of his customers is the local convent. One night as he’s delivering coal, he sees a young woman on the verge of hysteria, being forced into the building.
The convent is, supposedly, a training school for girls. As well, the local school that his daughters attend operates as part of the building giving the nuns, and the Mother Superior, Sister Mary (Emily Watson in a brief but powerful performance) a major role in the community. The fate of his daughter’s further education is largely in her hands.
Whether he’s consciously aware of this or not, it seems that Furlong is tuned to compassion.
Some of this dovetails with his own life. He was raised by a single mother at a time and place where that was still taboo, and never knowing the identity of his father.
The intensity of the young woman’s emotional response bothers him, and then haunts him to the point where he begins to watch the convent more closely. And although he is warned several times of the consequences of looking too hard or learning too much because of the power the nuns have over the people in the community, he can’t look away.
There are a few incidents that turn the corner for him on his understanding of what is happening in his small village. Very early one morning when he goes to make a coal delivery to the convent, he finds one of the girls, Sarah Redmond (Zara Devlin), freezing in the small unheated building outside where they keep the coal.
Sarah begs for help, but he takes her back, and ends up in a conversation with Sister Mary, who never makes her warning directly, but is chilling nonetheless.
Furlong is not a private detective or aiming to be a knight riding in on a white horse to save the world. He’s a person who has come on a situation that on some very deep level has hooked into his sense of himself and the world.
Small Things Like These doesn’t shine a bright light on Furlong’s dilemmas or his values or take us to a crescendo of easy heroism that would make the film an easy exercise.
What we’re drawn into is the way Murphy approaches the character. Furlong doesn’t say much, but his posture, the watchfulness, the way he pulls into himself as the story unfolds, all these very small moments give us a sense that he’s always wrestling within himself.
That he has reached a point in his life where he has questions that need answering. Where things are heading and what he’ll decide to do quietly creep up on him… and on us.
The film was shot on location in the village of New Ross, using locations related to the story. Director Tim Mielants has kept the film small and very dark. The story is set in 1985, but the mood and tone are claustrophobic and Dickensian, the moral questions feel like they belong to another century. In some ways the film feels like it could have been set in 1885.
The Magdalene schools were where unwed and so-called “fallen” women were sent to work in harsh and cruel conditions operated for over a century, and in parts of the world including Canada. It’s shocking to think that these things existed in the 1980s.
The story of the women doesn’t take the lead here, but rather it’s Furlong’s dilemma and ultimate choices that shapes it and makes us ask what we might do in the same circumstances.
Small Things Like These. Directed by Tim Mielants, written by Enda Walsh. Starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Watson, Eileen Walsh, and Zara Devlin. In theatres November 8.