‘Small Things Like These’ Review: Cillian Murphy Is Superb as a Haunted Man in Subdued but Powerful Irish Berlin Opener
Unlike Peter Mullan’s searing 2008 Venice Golden Lion winner, The Magdalene Sisters, or Joni Mitchell’s piercingly sad ballad, “The Magdalene Laundries,” the name given to the notorious workhouse institutions controlled by Irish religious orders is never spoken in Small Things Like These. But its Biblical evocation of the “fallen woman” is clear as a bell in this acutely affecting drama about how a glimpse of cruelty behind convent walls reopens the psychological wounds of a kind family man who has strived to build a life untainted by the stigma and sorrow of his childhood.
That man is Bill Furlong, a hard-working coal merchant and loving father of five daughters, played by Cillian Murphy in a performance that rips your heart out despite being an unimpeachable model of restraint.
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The actor’s work here could scarcely be more of a contrast to his fine-grained characterization as the soft-spoken but imposing title figure in Oppenheimer, with his hint of arrogance that chafes against so many peers. Bill is a reserved but profoundly decent man who appears to have spent his adult years taking up as little space as possible. Murphy fleshes him out with loaded silences and pained gestures, his pale, expressive eyes conveying a world of hurt, of trauma yanked back to the surface by startling experience.
Assured Belgian director Tim Mielants previously worked with Murphy on Peaky Blinders, while screenwriter Enda Walsh has collaborated with the actor on theater projects stretching back 20 years. Unlike some of his more abstract expressionistic plays, Walsh’s writing here is spare but crystalline, making it an ideal match for the prose of Claire Keegan, who penned the source novella.
One of Ireland’s leading contemporary authors, Keegan wrote the short story, Foster, that became the basis of the wondrous The Quiet Girl. The same clear-eyed compassion that graced Colm Bairéad’s film elevates this similarly small-scaled but wholly satisfying new adaptation. It’s subtle but resonant, intimate but emotionally expansive and at every step crisply unsentimental.
While the Magdalene Laundries, sometimes referred to as asylums, operated from the late 18th century, what’s most shocking about the shameful historical chapter is how long it was allowed to continue thanks to the complicit silence of a country under the thumb of the Catholic Church. It’s estimated that between 1922, when the Irish Free State was established, and 1996, when the last of the laundries was closed, more than 10,000 women were institutionalized and forced into unpaid labor. Many were unwed mothers whose babies were taken from them and given up for adoption.
Early indicators — Bill’s workers discuss a Barry McGuigan boxing match; a Dexys Midnight Runners song plays in the background at the pub — place the action in the mid-1980s. But like the setting of The Quiet Girl, the town of New Ross in Wexford County shows so little evidence of change it could be mistaken for 20 or even 30 years earlier. Frequent Mielants DP collaborator Frank van den Eeden shoots the narrow streets and unfancy homes in grays and browns that lean almost into sepia, with flashbacks to Bill’s childhood that have the look of hand-tinted vintage photographs. The textured sense of place is transporting.
Bill is busy in the runup to Christmas 1985, delivering coal and fuel to local families and businesses and then returning home each night where he scrubs the black dust from his hands and fingernails before sitting down to supper in a kitchen alive with the playful squabbling of his girls. He listens to them despite his fatigue and preoccupation, making it clear with just a look or a line or two of dialogue that affections run deep in the family, including with Bill’s supportive wife, Eileen (Eileen Walsh).
A delivery to the Good Shepherd Convent, separated only by a wall from the high school Bill’s smart eldest daughter Kathleen (Liaden Dunlea) attends, leaves Bill badly shaken. Standing half-hidden in the dark coal shed doorway, he witnesses a distraught young woman pleading with her mother and physically resisting before being forcibly placed in the nuns’ hands.
An encounter with the shy young son of a town alcoholic the same day further stirs up Bill’s vulnerability. When he remarks at home that he gave the kid some loose change, Eileen gently chides him for being soft-hearted. That moment is echoed later when his pragmatic wife tells him: “If you want to get on in this life, there are things you have to ignore.”
Walsh, who starred as one of the four young women at the center of The Magdalene Sisters, is excellent in the couple’s quiet moments alone. She seems torn between genuine concern for Bill and nervousness that anything he says publicly that could be considered hostile to the Church might expose them to disapproval in the community.
The small things of the title that rupture Bill’s fragile serenity send him spiraling back into lifelong sadness that has never healed, only been kept at bay. In childhood flashbacks he’s played with a tender ache by Louis Kirwan. The bullying he suffers at school as a kid born out of wedlock is seen only in the distress on the face of his mother Sarah (Agnes O’Casey), as she scrubs his jacket to remove traces of spit and whatever else has been hurled at him.
Sarah died young, leaving him in the warm care of Mrs. Wilson (Michelle Fairley), a financially comfortable widow who took them both in, and her farmhand Ned (Mark McKenna), who’s both a stepfather figure and a friend.
The economy with dialogue in Enda Walsh’s screenplay means nothing needs to be said for us to realize what’s going on in Bill’s head as he contemplates how easily he and his mother could have met a worse fate and how fearful he is for his own daughters. When watchful Eileen picks up on his suddenly deepened melancholia and his sleeplessness at night, Bill brushes it off as just being over-tired or coming down with a cold.
But his depressed, apprehensive state tightens its grip when he steps inside the convent to collect on an invoice. Lisa (Abby Fitz), a teenager on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor, suddenly hurls herself at him, tearfully begging him to drive her as far as the river, just to get her out of there.
Remaining true to Keegan’s novella, Small Things Like These isn’t chiefly about the Magdalene Laundries (which also provided the backdrop to Stephen Frears’ Philomena). It’s more focused on the way shame and institutional abuse can be a festering dirty secret. Bill begins to wrestle with his conscience over whether to do something or look the other way in silence, as most people in New Ross tend to do.
This is made clear by Mrs. Kehoe (Helen Behan), who runs the pub, when she takes Bill aside and warns him not to make enemies of the nuns, who have a hand in everything that goes on in the town. Without ever hammering the point, acquiescence is depicted as a form of societal cancer.
The dramatic centerpiece of the film is a knockout scene in which Bill finds the young woman he saw in the coal shed earlier, also named Sarah (Zara Devlin) like his mother, frightened and shivering in the same place. He accompanies her back inside the convent, where he’s invited — or ordered — to sit by the fireplace and have a cup of tea in the office of the Mother Superior, Sister Mary.
She is played by the great Emily Watson as a woman of God who has made whatever self-justifications were necessary to continue running a bustling laundry service for profit, built on indentured servitude. Her outward displays of concern toward young Sarah, like her cordial exchanges with Bill about his business and family, barely conceal intimidation tactics that she has no need to put into words. As she settles his account, she also takes out a Christmas card and addresses it to Eileen, slipping cash inside that’s presented as a gift but is clearly hush money. Sister Mary is a choice supporting role and Watson puts it across with an underlying steeliness that’s chilling.
Mielants, whose directing credits include FX’s Legion and the terrific Arctic-set first season of AMC’s horror anthology, The Terror, has a firm handle on the material that never falters. He coaxes the pathos out naturally and keeps the worst of what goes on at the Good Shepherd offscreen, an understated choice echoed in the light hand of Senjan Jansen’s score. Frequent shots observed through doorways deftly underline the weight of secrets in the story.
Led with aching sensitivity by Murphy (also a producer, alongside his Oppenheimer cast mate Matt Damon), this is a somber, unhurried drama that takes its cue from the seeming quietness of the title and is all the more intensely moving for it. It ends at what might be a dramatically charged mid-point for many stories, but the filmmakers simply let it linger here, to great effect.
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