He could play Jimmy Stewart, our Cillian Murphy. With his lanky features, his presence and poise and those bright blue eyes, always either steeled in determination or pooled into despair on the big screen, he could easily step into the shoes of the great American everyman for some middling biopic.
Who Murphy did play this year is New Ross coalman Bill Furlong, and as Christmas looms in a Wexford winter in 1985 in Small Things Like These, Bill is worse than sick, he’s discouraged. Just like Stewart’s George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, Bill is a pillar of the community, a charitable neighbour, a doting family man, and a depressed and repressed soul. Both films tell stories of hardship and self-sacrifice leading to beautiful moments of grace. Though Small Things throughout is more grounded and understated than Wonderful Life‘s cathartically joyful ending, one of the best films of this year and the timeless classic are paralleled in the way their protagonists come in from the cold.
Where George’s despair puts him on the brink of ending it all, it’s his latest selfless act, pivoting his suicide into saving the drowning eccentric angel Clarence, that starts off his salvation, with Clarence showing him just how much his life has meant to those around him by showing him their fates if he had never been born. Bill has no angel to guide him, but he is similarly compelled to process his past; confronted with the abuses of his local Magdelene laundry leads Bill to reflections on his own upbringing that are, in their way, a look at a life impacted by absence – his single mother sidelined from society, his father unknown and unacknowledged, his upbringing upended early by loss.
Bill is kind and considerate, but is distanced by despair, both his own sadness, and then his pause and powerlessness seeing the treatment of the girls at the laundry. Small Things’ director Tim Mielants and cinematographer Frank van den Eeden frame the story almost aways at arm’s length, on the other side of doorways, down hallways, through windows we’re kept apart, the character’s sadness accentuated by the awkward separation. Frank Capra tends to reveal George Bailey’s despondence more in close-up, Stewart’s war-torn features scrunched up as he holds in the pain every time George sacrifices his dreams in service of others.
In one standout scene though the resentment of George Bailey boils over, Stewart flails, yells and stalks through his run-down home, the camera struggling to keep pace, Capra finding himself likewise stalking behind in the doorways and staircases. It’s when George comes home, after finding that his Uncle Billy has lost $8,000 cash receipts for their savings and loan business. George is set to take the blame, his latest charitable act awfully imposed on him, and it’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
In a fantastic essay on the old A.V. Club website, writer Mike D’Angelo describes George’s patience thinning fantastically, the film’s form and function coming together as Stewart brings the character to breaking point. As daughter Janie tunelessly plinks away practicing on the family piano, the chaotic family home needle at George until he loses his temper with her.
“Janie knows all the correct notes but can’t play them at the correct tempo, and the close-but-no-cigar effect serves to unconsciously remind George of the many times that he’s almost achieved his goals, only to be foiled by awful timing. Plus, it’s just kind of maddening, even for someone not having the worst day of his entire crummy life. Certainly this is the moment in the film when the title seems most painfully ironic.”
There’s a strikingly similar scene in Small Things, albeit one where Bill’s emotional turmoil is much more internal. In their cramped house, he sits at the kitchen table while one of his daughters’ practices carols on an accordion, a challenging sound even if she was getting it right. Cillian Murphy doesn’t gnash and wail, though. Those eyes hollow long into the distance, the more the notes drone on the further away he goes in his mind. His wife has already told him to keep his head down and keep quiet about the abuse he’s seen, Eileen Walsh a world away from the Donna Reed strain of empathy. He can’t unsee the jeers and stares of boys in the town, the pain and desperation from the girls in the laundry, a whole world of cruelty and misogyny that he can’t possibly do anything about. Can’t he?
Emily Watson’s controlling Mother Superior is an evil inverse of Wonderful Life’s Clarence, George Bailey’s quirky, kindly spiritual guardian angel. When Bill Furlong finds an expectant mother (Zara Devlin’s Sarah) consigned to the coal shed, Sister Mary gaslights him about the circumstances, or rather, she bullies he and Sarah into toeing the line. With dangerously quiet subtly, she brings up his daughters attending the school next door. The world of the laundry and of the community are so closely tied, but the wall between them must never be broken, or it’s him that will get crushed beneath it. Clarence reminds George Bailey of what would be lost without him. Sister Mary reminds Bill of everything he has to lose. In a Christmas card, she passes on a ‘bonus’ (bribe). Far from telling him that ‘no man is a failure who has friends’, Bill is told in no uncertain terms that if he doesn’t accept this particular form of friendship, he’s doomed to fail.
And so the kitchen table, the thousand yard stare, the accordion. Bill must accept cruelty to that young woman, to protect his own daughters, so say the nuns, his wife, the whispering town folk. Toe the line and you can just about get by, it’s a sentiment spidery old Mister Potter would be proud of. What kind of life though is he saving for her daughters, though, or anyone else? A life either in silence, or suffering doesn’t sound so wonderful. He remembers his mother, shunned and spat at. He remembers the wealthy widower who took her in, and him, and how what mattered wasn’t that she was able to do so, but that she did. By the end of the film, Bill knows what he must do, because it’s the only thing to do.
The measure of George Bailey was not how much he travelled, or how much money he made, or what he saw or accomplished, neither is Bill Furlong’s pariahed parentage, comfortable upbringing or humble trade, the real measure of the man. Despite the divine intervention in It’s a Wonderful Life, its message of how each man’s life touches so many others should serve as an egalitarian call-to-action, when we save others, we save ourselves, and vice versa.
When Bill walks young Sarah, pregnant, cast-out and uncared for, into his home, the people of New Ross do not flood in after him carolling. His family don’t weep with joy, in fact they don’t even notice at first, so used to their father coming and going quietly like a ghost. He takes her into the sitting room, into his wonderful life, and his wife and daughters are stunned. We see only Bill and the girl, his small, grand gesture, and in the deafening stunned silence we cut to black.
But over the credits, bells ring.
