Directed by Tim Mielants, Small Things Like These, set in 1985, doesn’t veer from the 116-page book at all.
It’s a quiet character study about a working-class man, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant (Cillian Murphy) who learns of an abusive situation, long-ignored, in a convent laundry headed by Sister Mary (Emily Watson).
He wrestles with his conscience and those around him, as to whether he should, more or less could, do anything to prevent it.
In today’s society this story is especially relevant; we shouldn’t turn a blind eye to suffering just because it’s the easy option – and practically expected – to do so.
We should help in whatever small way we can. Kindness is courage.
Going against the grain to do what’s right counts more when the weight of the world’s injustices become so overwhelming that to ignore them seems like the only choice.
It is Chekov’s dictum, “When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace.”
Small Things Like These, which Murphy also produced, is a small thing when compared with Oppenheimer, a film which Murphy won an Oscar for (Best Actor).
Murphy arguably gives his best performance ever with excruciating intensity as Bill Furlong, delivering coal and as a family man who finds himself at loggerheads with the Catholic Church, the ultimate authority in the country town where he lives.
People exist somewhere amid poverty, just getting by, and/or modest means, good Catholics all, much as they have for generations.
Bill Furlong delivers coal to the nearby Magdalene laundry, run by the same nuns as the local convent where his five daughters attend school.
Upset no one and his girls receive an education. Everyone knows everyone else’s business in these parts, but advice is to mind one’s own.
He notices things: a shivering barefoot boy drinking a bowl of milk left on a stoop, a woman resisting a drunken oaf trying to kiss her.
He glimpses a screaming girl dragged to the front door of the convent by her mother.
Bill cannot un-see what he has seen.
At home he looks at his five daughters differently.
Safe? Yes, but at risk because they are girls. He wants to protect them.
When he finds a young girl (Zara Devlin) locked in the laundry’s coal cellar on a freezing winter’s night, his pragmatic wife Eileen (Eileen Walsh) tells him, “If you want to get on in life there are things you have to ignore.”
He can’t.
Icy eyes of Sister Mary burning into Bill for the first time, he learns her enormous power.
This woman runs the convent and the girls’ school next door which his daughters attend.
He knows his youngest girls might pay the price if he “tells” what he saw. This is what absolute power looks like.
Warned against contending with a Church’s institutional abuse, Bill asks in his quiet repressed manner, “Surely they’ve only as much power as we give them?”
Bill himself is illegitimate, saved from adoption by his mother’s affluent Protestant employer.
He has always felt an outsider, especially after being orphaned. Bill’s melancholy fades into memories of his own childhood.
He doesn’t know who his father was.
Memories haunt Bill. Words fail to soothe.
Driven by a terrible inner reckoning in portraying Bill, it’s all there in Murphy’s face.
This man of sorrows bears the sins of both Church and nation.
Rising above accusatory tone by emphasising the journey of a man’s soul, it is a literary state of grace, Small Things Like These assures us we are all capable of doing the right thing, and that goodness, like misery, can be handed on one person to another.
Movie: Small Things Like These
Duration: 99 mins
Director: Tim Mielants
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Eileen Walsh, Emily Watson, Zara Devlin
Rating: ****½
Reviewed by Lawrenty
