“What is brilliant about Small Things Like These is the way sound and light are used to carry the viewer into Bill’s world.”
At this stage in his career, Cillian Murphy seems to be exploring explosions. It started with portraying the creator of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, in Christopher Nolan’s rightfully multi-awarded blockbuster. Now, he is in a quiet masterpiece (but a masterpiece nonetheless), and again he delves into blowing up — albeit a more silent set of implosions rather than the grand explosion at the center of the Manhattan Project. In Tim Mielants’ historical drama Small Things Like These, based on the 2021 award-winning novel by Irish writer Claire Keegan, he plays Bill Furlong, a man who has been holding it together for far too long. Every emotion for him is like one of those sneezes we try to suppress, allowing it to implode quietly, which can be catastrophic to our inner health. And it seems to be making Bill utterly depressed.
At the core of his unhappiness is Catholic guilt. He is the product of an unmarried Irish mother who had him at a young age, and luckily with the right kind of boy — one whose own mother was fiercely independent and revolutionary in her beliefs. Yet all around Bill and his mom are the goings-on of the Magdalene Laundries, a series of institutions run by nuns who would “help” young pregnant girls — deemed “lost women” — deliver their babies, then adopt the offspring into “proper” families without the mothers’ consent and keep the women on to work in laundries they ran, treating them like slaves basically.
Bill is a good man. He runs a successful coal delivery business and is surrounded by women, with his wife and his numerous daughters at the heart of it. He is the kind of father those of us who grew up with an inadequate one always wished for. Quiet and kind, generous and always thinking of others, one who ducks into a tiny bathroom to wash away the soot of his work every evening to make himself presentable for his girls. Dutch DoP Frank van den Eeden shoots the film in such an intimate way that we, the audience, feel crowded in this small cubicle Bill occupies, and feel the splashes of the water he mixes in the sink to make it just the right temperature (something most people living in older homes in England and Ireland will recognize).
Yet Bill remembers things about his childhood which keep him up at night, and ominously gives the impression that he’s going to do something drastic unless he deals with his feelings. Just as he is starting to peel away the layers of his upbringing and beginning to tackle his deep sense of guilt (the story takes place in Catholic Ireland after all) he runs into a girl at a convent he regularly delivers to. She changes his life, but also the lives of those around him.
What is brilliant about Small Things Like These, co-produced by Murphy with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck for their Artists Equity company, is the way sound and light are used to carry the viewer into Bill’s world, but also show us the perils of a world dominated by religious cults. The UK is currently overrun by religions of a plethora of different credos and doctrines, along with a stable of NGOs that push their own agendas to ensure continuing to receive tax-free funding. The film tackles the impossibility of changing anything while such charities are around, because no one wants to rock the proverbial boat and be the bad guy. “Mind your own business,” Bill is often told. Because on the surface, these are organizations that hide under the pretext of doing good for the people; how could you ever argue with that?
When Bill comes face to face with Sister Mary, the mother superior of the convent played by the luminous Emily Watson, the scene quickly becomes like an ominous prequel of bad things to come in a horror film and puts the audience at the edge of their seats; it is a wonderful sequence that needs to be seen to be believed. It is a testament to the divine script by writer and director Enda Walsh, who doesn’t stray from the book, yet manages to tell the story in a concise 90-minute film which is simply perfect in every way. No wonder Murphy felt “emotionally knocked out” by this film, as he confessed on the red carpet to a television crew.
Image copyright: Shane O’Connor