Maven's Nest
Reel Life: Flick Pix
Murphy doesn’t need words to agonize over whether to be a working-class hero as his past intrudes with what he witnesses.
By Nora Lee Mandel
SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE
Directed by Tim Mielants
Written by Enda Walsh, based on the novel by Claire Keegan
Produced by Alan Moloney, Cillian Murphy, Catherine Magee, Matt Damon, and Drew Vinton
1 hr 37 mins. Rated PG-13.
With: Cillian Murphy, Eileen Walsh, Michelle Fairley, Clare Dunne, Helen Behan, Emily Watson, and Agnes O’Casey.
Release in U.S. theaters on November 8 by Lionsgate
Small Things Like These is a moving portrait of one quiet man who is troubled by his Irish community’s indifference to an institutional injustice and wrestles with his conscience what to do. While Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters (2002) broke the public silence about the systemic abuse of women and babies behind convent walls, Cillian Murphy, in his first feature producing venture, put together the mostly Irish cast and crew for a story that portrays the parallel perpetuation of decades of complicity.
Filmed where Claire Keegan’s award-winning novella is set, in the distinctive riverfront town of New Ross, County Wexford, the church steeples dominate the skyline and their carillons mark the residents’ daily routines. Murphy is “Bill Furlong”, owner of a coal yard, who schleps and collects payments on loads of fuel he delivers in a rickety truck, though people are having trouble paying his invoices. One client that can pay, “only walls away” from his daughters’ school, is the local convent. Sometimes he can’t help but see when a hysterical teenage girl runs outside and gets shoved back in. Or hear a baby cry.
At his small home, he’s a devoted husband, affectionate father of five lively daughters, helping with homework and Christmas preparations. But that crying girl stirs haunting memories of his young, single mother “Sarah” (Agnes O’Casey) who died when he was a child, and then the stigma of being an orphan. He can’t sleep.
His wife “Eileen” (Eileen Walsh) hopes they’ll have funds for new windows after holiday expenses; he’s worried if the men at the yard or the boys in town are bothering their precious daughters. While his girls prepare gift requests to Santa, he remembers the Protestant middle-class foster mother “Mrs. Wilson” (Michelle Fairley) who lent her copy of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. White Christmas week is pervasive, with the New Ross celebration far more Catholic than that Victorian model.
On a pre-dawn coal and invoice delivery to the convent, “Furlong” sees disheveled girls on their knees scrubbing the floor, and one runs to him crying, begging for help, or, desperate, to get her to the river. A nun interrupts. Later, he tries to tell his wife what happened. Representing the community’s attitude, she thinks he’s too soft-hearted: “If you want to get on in this life, there’s things you have to ignore.”
So he works harder shoveling coal and talks evens less. But when he delivers the ordered load to the convent, he finds the girl “Sarah Redmond” (Zara Devlin) has been locked into the coal shed for quite a while, crying about her missing baby. He brings her out, and “Sister Mary” (Emily Watson) takes over her and him. He glimpses the crowded, steamy laundry on the way to her office. After paying the bill, the Mother Superior counts out additional cash for what she calls a Christmas gift to his wife: “I’m sure she’ll appreciate it.” She forcefully insists he take it. “Furlong” is reluctant to accept the bribe for his silence. “Sr. Mary” leads a responsive Biblical reading in church, and gets word to “Eileen” there’s an envelope waiting for her. Even at the Christmas Eve buffet for his workers, the manager knows to warn “Furlong” that his daughters’ futures are at stake: “Those nuns have a finger in every pie. They can make things difficult for you.”
As the narrow buildings and streets fill with the warmth of Christmas hymns, lights, and tipsy celebrants, Belgian director Tim Mielants and his frequent collaborator cinematographer Frank Van Den Eeden emphasize the sense of crows and everyone else watching. The camera is a spy, always moving slowly along snowy spaces and through windows. As communicated non-verbally by Murphy, it’s not easy to even think of being a working-class hero, until his own past intrudes with what he witnesses.
Like Stephen Frears’ adaptation of Philomena (2013), Small Things Like These strips the societal context from the source material to point the finger at just one scary nun, instead of these facilities in towns all over Ireland supported by the Irish government from its founding and run by the Catholic Church until 1996. (Murphy has pointed out in promotional interviews “that there are still people walking around” whose lives, as women or babies, were impacted by this system – as seen in the recent BBC series The Woman in the Wall.) Keegan’s novel quotes facts as “gossip” about the laundry’s “good reputation: restaurants and guest-houses, the nursing home and the hospital and all the priests and well-off households sent their washing there…[G]irls of low character…spent their days being reformed, doing penance by washing stains out of the dirty linen, that they worked from dawn til night.” Her folks gossip that the girls’ “own people…had put them in there” and “the nuns got good money by placing these babies out foreign, that it was an industry they had going.” The film, like the book, is dedicated to all those victims.
This adaptation successfully raises moral questions for discussion, about the private act of an individual, its personal and social consequences. To risk exaggerating the significance, I was reminded of a German colleague who was proud that his Gestapo father was approved for post-war de-Nazification because during the war he had brought groceries from his mother’s shop to a hidden Jew. History could ask “What if more people had done a small thing?”
11/6/2024
Nora Lee Mandel is a member of New York Film Critics Online. Her reviews are counted in the Rotten Tomatoes TomatoMeter:
Complete Index to Nora Lee Mandel's Movie Reviews
My reviews have appeared on: FF2 Media; Film-Forward; Lilith, FilmFestivalTraveler; and, Alliance of Women Film Journalists and for Jewish film festivals. Shorter versions of my older reviews are at IMDb's comments, where non-English-language films are listed by their native titles.
To the Mandel Maven's Nest Reel Life: Flick Pix
Copyright © 2024