SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE
(The 2024 Middleburg Film Festival ran October 17-20. Check our Chris Reed’s Small Things Like These movie review. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
With her 2010 short story “Foster,” Irish writer Claire Keegan established herself as a beautiful prosaist, able to evoke profound emotional experiences with great economy. The magnificent 2022 feature film The Quiet Girl brought that slim volume to the screen with lovely precision, befitting the simplicity and grace of its source. Keegan’s work is back now, serving as inspiration for Small Things Like These, which adapts her eponymous 2021 novella. Directed by Tim Mielants (Will) and starring Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer), the movie shines a light on Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and one man’s compassionate response to their abuses. It’s a worthy successor to Keegan’s previous cinematic adaptation.
Murphy plays Bill Furlong, a Catholic coal merchant living in New Ross, in County Wexford, Ireland. A husband and father to five daughters, Bill is a respected member of the community, though he did not start out that way. As we learn over the course of the drama, he was born out of wedlock to a teenage mother who was fortunate enough to be given a home by her Protestant employer, a financially independent widow who did not care what her neighbors thought. Those early-childhood circumstances have left a mark on Bill, making him a little more ready to help those in need than others. Even his wife, Eileen (Eileen Walsh, Made in Italy), finds him a little too much of a soft touch.
Still, theirs is not an unhappy life, even if Bill works hard with long hours. The year is 1985, and his girls get a good education courtesy of the local nuns. With Christmas fast approaching, it appears that Bill and Eileen have nothing but another happy holiday to celebrate. Until, that is, Bill discovers something—or rather, someone—at the area convent that deeply unsettles him. He may have built up his business by keeping his head down, but there are times when a man of conscience simply cannot look away.
Mielants carefully builds the tension in an unfolding series of almost distressingly quiet scenes, intercut with flashbacks to Bill’s youth. Shot on location in County Wexford, the movie’s color palette moves between murky hues of brown, blue, and yellow, depending on whether it is day (often early morning or at twilight), night, or indoors, building a sense of emotional claustrophobia from which Bill might suffocate if he doesn’t scream. He is constitutionally incapable of such an act, and so must find another way. The jumps to the past feature brighter lighting, though those moments, too, showcase the roots of Bill’s suppressed grief.
The Catholic Church in Ireland—here represented by Sister Mary (Emily Watson, God’s Creatures), the convent’s mother superior—has many sins to expiate, among them its treatment of the unwed pregnant women it abused for decades (a final title card gives the full range of years). As with all oppressive systems, however, it is everyone else who goes along that allows the pain and suffering to continue. And in this case, religion and everyday life are so inextricably linked, with benefits flowing from parishioner to church and back again, that the questions raised are more complex than a simple good vs. evil.
Mielants and his screenwriter, Enda Walsh (Lazarus), do full justice to Keegan’s text, honoring the hushed rage that simmers just below Bill’s seemingly placid surface. When our protagonist finally reaches a breaking point, there is no big set piece, just grim (and merciful) resolve. Murphy delivers exactly the kind of performance this heartfelt narrative deserves, keeping Bill’s feelings at a careful remove, yet always still visible. It’s the small things like these that make a movie great.
– Christopher Llewellyn Reed (@ChrisReedFilm)
2024 Middleburg Film Festival; Tim Mielants; Small Things Like These
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