Director: Tim Mielants Starring: Cillian Murphy, Eileen Walsh, Emily Watson, Zara Devlin, Michelle Fairley, Clare Dunne Running Time: 98 minutes
One of the big talking points during Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer awards offensive was that it was finally a showcase for the actor as a leading man on film, a step into the spotlight from the otherwise reclusive supporting player. Irish audiences knew better, from paramilitaries to Pluto, the Corkman’s track record for top billing in our homegrown films is iconic and impressive. Murphy’s first work since that Oscar success continues that fine record. With Enda Walsh adapting Claire Keegan, and Murphy the main man on screen, Small Things Like These sees some of Ireland’s art greats come together, but the result is typical of their respective careful crafts; an understated and subtle but massively impactful and emotional story.
Murphy is Bill Furlong, a coal merchant from New Ross getting through the orders before Christmas of 1985. Bill has a good trade, a loving family, he’s well known and respected in the community, he seems comfortable, but there are weights on the man’s mind that slump into the way that Bill is carried by Murphy’s sharpened frame. As it becomes increasingly obvious to Bill that the ‘training school for girls’ at the local convent is in fact a Magdalen laundry, and that the home and trade provided for the girls there is all abuse and cruelty and neglect, both the uncertainty of whether to intervene, and the memories it unlocks from his own childhood, shake Bill into a fugue of guilt, shame and doubt.
Himself born to an unmarried teenager, cast out by her family and community but continuing to work as a maid by her kind-hearted employer, Bill’s own childhood was one of confusion, secrets and obscurity, which we see play out in flashbacks that emerge under light in Bill’s suffering psyche. With the fate of his mother in the past, the imprisoned girls in the present and the potential for his own daughters in the future spinning, Bill’s moral compass is kept spinning by the ruthless controlling hands of the local nuns (an imposing Emily Walsh and heckling Clare Dunne) and the hushed self-preservation priorities of his wife Eileen (Eileen Walsh).
The subtly and clarity in the storytelling, and the care in the performances prevents the above from being a story about a noble white knight standing above harpies to save defenceless girls. Walsh plays the warning wife role with just the right amount of warmth, while Murphy’s Bill is a million miles away, lost in so many emotions that the actor plays with an exceptional mix of resonance and restraint. There are no big bold speeches, no showy losses of controls, just a glassiness over those brilliant blue eyes, a shaking as he scrubs coal stains from his hands like he’s Lady Macbeth.
There’s something of an inverted It’s A Wonderful Life about the story, one man being made starkly aware of people’s colder, crueller nature and being asked how he’ll live with it. The power of Bill’s journey and his actions isn’t big, bold and beautiful, it’s in, well, the small things.
Taking us into the Laundry, Tim Mielants and cinematographer Frank van den Eeden make the place look like the Hell that it is. Watson issues veiled threats in chiaroscuro side rooms, nuns appear as if from nowhere to harry Murphy through halls of uncertain geography, the space’s tight and indefinable dimensions obscuring the depth of the abuse within it. And the girls, the abused, are always just in the background, just down the frame, always almost out of sight, the better to be out of mind. Chilling sound design brings the sounds of babies crying that we never see, which contrast with the chat and banter in Bill’s home, both in the distance for Bill for different reasons.
Everything is in the implications in Small Things Like These, we know why the babies cry, why the girls are languid and lifeless, we know Bill’s traumas and what Eileen is afraid of losing, though the film is quiet and measured and patient, the tension in this implications builds bigger and bigger – when will what is happening in the margins be acknowledged, when will someone step up and make a statement. The film’s amazing use of sound and silence, the distance created by the camera and the brilliant body language of Murphy and the other actors combine for an exceptional final shot, a unfinished note, a sentence interrupted, just as Ireland’s real reckoning with the abuses in this story remain unfinished.
The direction is tense and tightly knit, the heavier to make a small and straightforward story, the performances poised and perfect, the writing purposeful and precise. Delicate, gentle but massively impactful, Small Things Like These is one of the films of the year, for Ireland or otherwise.
(5 / 5)