Small Things Like These may have been filmed before Cillian Murphy won his Oscar for Oppenheimer, but there’s still something nice and poetic about his first movie post-Academy Award being a pointed and poignant social drama taking him back home to Ireland. Although not to sing the praises of his home country and culture on this occasion. In fact it is a movie that, in its own way, is just as bleak as Oppenheimer -only on a more localized scale.
Based on the award-winning novel by Claire Keegan and adapted by the great playwright Enda Walsh for newcomer director Tim Mielants, Small Things Like These is a story of the Magdalene Laundries -Catholic run institutions through the twentieth century ostensibly meant to be havens for “fallen women” -impoverished or orphaned girls and in many cases sex workers- but that were in reality a system of extreme abuse, the women in such institutions worked to the bone and treated with abject scorn and derision. The reality of the Magdalene Laundries and the true extent of their cruelties wasn’t revealed until a 1993 discovery of more than a hundred bodies in unmarked graves on convent grounds. This story, set almost a decade prior, follows one man’s gradual uncovering of this deeply dark corner of his otherwise quaint traditional community.
Murphy’s Bill Furlong is a coal merchant in New Ross in the 1980s whose poor and traumatic childhood perhaps makes him more aware of the depressed conditions of the town around him and the troubles of the less fortunate. In an early scene, he gives some money to a boy walking alone -possibly runaway from a drunken father, and which his wife criticizes him for later while he feigns a belief in the father getting better. He also on his deliveries sees a hysterical girl being taken by her mother to the nuns and consciously ignores it. This he says nothing about, though he clearly knows something of what awaits her in their care and it bothers him considerably. He’s a compassionate man, and you can read in his face a deep sense of the weight of misery in his community, much as he tries vainly to hide in the guise of a more socially acceptable ignorance. He’s been taught not to make a fuss, as we see both in flashbacks to his childhood and the early death of his single mother -a “fallen woman” herself- and in the pressure of the community’s normalcy.
These kind of subtleties are where Murphy shines as an actor -the quiet of contemplation and a knowledge he wishes he didn’t have. It was one of the many layers he brought to Oppenheimer and on this smaller scale it is as powerful. This is a movie driven by implication, by what isn’t quite seen but understood. When Bill finds a pregnant girl hiding in the coal shed of a convent, a part of him knows exactly why she is there, and knows that what he is obliged to do may leave her the worse off. But he doesn’t see another choice. Bill spends much of the movie in this space of tangible discomfort beneath the surface, constrained by circumstance and unable to speak out, and it is a masterfully solemn performance. Even in crowd scenes, at church or at home (where he has five daughters), the paleness of his face is tangible.
We don't see even a glimpse of the Magdalene Laundry until late in the film, but that thread of unseen yet potent trauma weaves through the movie. The death of Bill's mother when he was a child, that seemed to come out of nowhere, is tinged with, if not a direct connection to these same institutions than to other oppressive social forces that punished her as a single young mother and implicit sex worker. The environment reflects the dour mood of this -even as most of the story is set at Christmas time. The sky is overcast, the site of Bill's work bleak and colourless, the kitchen of his home -though quite a degree warmer- claustrophobic and overwhelming as the camera boxes him in between his girls. It's some very considered filmmaking from Mielants, capturing the mood of Bill's perspective so different to that of most of the people around him, including even his sympathetic wife played by Eileen Walsh.
As the movie drums along in mundane acknowledgement of something sinister going on, it builds its underwritten tension, up to the point Bill is confronted with a glimmer of the truth when he delivers Sarah (Zara Devlin) into the hands of local Mother Superior Sister Mary (Emily Watson -her second movie in a row about an uncomfortable darkness within a small Irish community). There is such a clear sense of falseness to the concern and care she and her colleagues show Sarah that can't help but slip in a few moments of impatience. And the double-talk and veiled threats she engages in with Bill convey a palpable menace. Even a Hail Mary offering of help to Sarah if she needs anything, an unremarkable gesture, is threatening to the nuns -they really are painted with a sharp vileness. It's perhaps not hard to understand why, beyond just the mere facts of what they did. The Catholic Church has refused to apologize or compensate the victims of these institutions, in spite of many calls to do so. The simmering rage of the movie's overarching attitude, stifled by fictitious mores of polite society, seems fairly justified in light of that.
The movie closes on some modicum of catharsis -one of those small things from Bill that makes a difference- and a postscript noting the Magdalene laundries continued activity until 1998. As a Canadian, that date struck a chilling chord -it was the same year that the last residential school closed, an institution in this country very much as prevalent and abusive as the Magdalene laundries in Ireland. I empathize greatly with the collective trauma the movie taps into here -many Canadians too knew on some level the bitter truth but bit their tongues like Bill as a matter of custom. That psychology, that perspective is what Small Things Like These relays perfectly -largely on the back of Murphy's performance, though also the melancholy mood of Mielants' direction and the careful allusions of Walsh's script. For its dreary, almost dull inauspiciousness, it is a potent reckoning. One of the great recent movies about the accepted cruelties haphazardly hidden just under our nose.
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