Small Things Like These directed by Tim Mielants is the second Claire Keegan adaptation from novella to screen. The Irish author’s moving social realist tales lend themselves to subtle and intimate interpretations. The first film was Colm Bairéad’s exquisite An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl) taken from Keegan’s ‘Foster’ garnered an Academy Award nomination. Academy Award winning actor Cillian Murphy helms the 1985 set drama about a man discovering he cannot ignore the actions of the powerful local convent running a Magdalene laundry for ‘girls of low character’ who have become pregnant out of wedlock.
Billy Furlough (Murphy) supplies coal and firewood for New Ross, County Wexford. His days start at dawn gathering the fuel he drives across the county in near silence. It is days before Christmas, and he is busier than usual beneath the grey skies. Bill is a generous and gentle soul. He doesn’t speak often and keeps himself out of the small-town gossip. He adores his five daughters, each brimming with noise and possibility. Every day after work he comes into his terrace house and scrubs the coal dust from his hands. His wife, Eileen (Eileen Walsh) notices he is increasingly “not himself” – he is sleeping poorly. It could be the exhaustion of the rush, but there is something indefinable burdening Bill and he is unravelling under its weight.
Bill is making near daily deliveries to the Good Shepherd Convent. He witnesses a young teen, about the age of his eldest daughter Kathleen (Laidán Dunlea) being forcibly pushed into the convent by her mother. She is terrified. The outwardly peaceful home for young women is never truly peaceful with the sound of squawking poultry and crying babies mixing in a miserable cacophony.
Bill’s mind is set back to when he was a child. His mother, Sarah (Agnes O’Casey) quietly weeping as she washes spittle out of his school blazer. Bill (Louis Kirwan) is illegitimate, and he and Sarah live with the relatively wealthy Protestant widow Mrs Wilson (Michelle Fairley) and her son Ned (Mark McKenna). Sarah is a domestic servant but both she and Bill are treated as almost family. Mrs Wilson looks deeply into Bill’s searching blue eyes and sees an innocent and confused boy asking for a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas and the whereabouts of his father. They read Dickens together. In the present day when Eileen asks what he would like as a gift he suggests ‘David Copperfield’ because he never got around to that one.
All around New Ross the adult Bill watches (often through windows) the possible lives he and his mother might have lived. The poverty-stricken boy Diarmuid Sinnott (Tadhg Moloney) gathering up sticks by the road for firewood to heat his drunken father’s hearth. An undernourished and underdressed boy drinking stolen milk in the night. And the convent home girls – of which his mother could have easily been one.
New Ross comes to life in the town square where young men flirt with young girls. Christmas carols sung in Gaelic by the St Margaret’s school choir featuring Bill’s second eldest, Joan (Giulia Doherty). Bill’s unremarkable small life is blessed by the warm chitchat of his daughters as they bake and write letters to Santa, the respect of the men who work for him, and the admiration of the local pub land lady, Mrs Kehoe. But after one of the convent girls begs him in distress to drive her as far as the river (he says, “It’s not up to me” and returns her inside to the nuns) his already heavy breathing becomes more laboured, and he can’t seem to scrub his hands enough to feel clean.
Bill’s memories filter back. He recalls his quiet tantrum over being given a hot water bottle instead of the jigsaw puzzle he requested for Christmas and a copy of ‘David Copperfield’ unwrapped next to him. He remembers Ned telling him that if he wants anything to go straight to him, the man. He sees his mother Sarah in Ned’s arms, once with a stolen kiss and once as Ned cradles her dead body.
Bill sees too much. Eileen reminds him that to get along he needs to “keep his head down and stay on the right side of people.” There are things that aren’t his business and what happens in the convent, according to Eileen, is something he should understand as he “knows girls get in trouble,” reminding him of his illegitimacy and suggesting that his mother’s unmarried state will be forever a stain on her character and his.
Finally, Bill reaches a point where he can’t turn away. Opening the coal shed outside the convent he finds an abused and freezing girl (Zara Devlin) who is disoriented but clear headed enough to know she is a prisoner of the nuns, and her baby will share her suffering if she does not comply. Bill gently walks her into the convent where Emily Watson’s Mother Superior, Sister Mary holds the future of his daughters and their education to ransom if he speaks of what he “thinks” he saw. The calm evil Sister Mary exudes with their friendly chat over cup of tea, and a Christmas card bribe comes with knowledge that the black crow frequented convent is the seat of power sanctioned by the Church and the government. She addresses the card to his wife and places ten times the money she pays him for his honest labour inside of it.
The moral quandary Bill finds himself in is exacerbated by the town gossiping about his visits to the convent. “They have a finger in every pie, they do. People can make things difficult for you,” Mrs Kehoe earnestly warns him. Sister Mary and her crows hold the town in their grip. She conducts the church prayers. “Response” she intones after her reading of “The Lord is Compassion and love,” and the congregation is almost the entire population. His wife and his daughters are a mere finger point away from being exiled.
Tim Mielants’ directorial mannerisms in Small Things Like These are reminiscent of a less formalised Terrence Davies work. The camera is never hurried and lingers behind panes of glass and reflections. The window Bill places himself in front of during his insomnia looking out on the neighbours as they pass by his home. The rain dappled windscreen of his truck. The window where his child self observed a truth he didn’t comprehend. A shop window with a jigsaw puzzle placed beneath a shelf of Rubik’s cubes. A barber shop mirror where he finally understands where he came from and who he must be.
Cillian Murphy has few lines but almost every word he speaks is vital. Bill did learn to keep his head down and get on with his life. He is not a man of declarations or grand arguments. His external reactions are measured but his eyes and face convey his compassion, his nobility, and the pain he feels being complicit in the culture of turning away from systemic and hypocritical exploitation. Bill grew up as an open secret and his existence and identity were part of a lie. Murphy’s thoughtful and emotionally rich performance is remarkable. An ordinary man who is driven by the better angels of earnest care and steadfast humanity.
Small Things Like These takes one man’s ‘small’ but substantial rebellion against the long lasting, pernicious, and chilling systemic mistreatment by the Catholic church of disposable young women and children. The Magdalene laundries were punitive, and reform was a code word for control. Tens of thousands of women and children lost their identities and lives to the secret and invisible imprisonment with the last of the laundries closing in 1998.
Small Things Like These eschews melodrama and explicit misery mining. Mielants stays true to the tone of Claire Keegan’s novella by not showing what was happening inside the laundries concentrating instead on their ability to influence and control communities and make them biddable. Small Things Like These is a subdued and purposeful drama led by Cillian Murphy’s soulful and sincere presence.
Director: Tim Mielants
Cast: Cillian Murphy, Patrick Ryan, Peter Claffey
Writer: Enda Walsh, (Based on the book by Claire Keegan)
Producers: Matt Damon, Catherine Magee, Alan Moloney, Cillian Murphy, Jeff Robinov, Drew Vinton
Music: Senjan Jansen
Cinematography: Frank van den Eeden
Editor: Alain Dessauvage
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