Joyce Glasser reviews Small Things Like These (November 1, 2024) Cert. 12A, 98 mins. In cinemas
After the affecting film adaptation of Claire Keegan’s story Foster (retitled The Quiet Girl) became Ireland’s first film nominated for an Academy Award for Best International Feature and won a Best Adapted Screenplay BAFTA, it was only a matter of time before Keegan’s Small Things Like These was turned into a film. But there was another financial and artistic incentive. Straight from his Best Actor Academy Award in the big budget, IMAX Oppenheimer, Foster fan Cillian Murphy returned to his Irish roots as actor-producer behind this considerably smaller film.
There is, however, a Hollywood connection, as none other than Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are executive producers and a Continental European connection as, considerably lesser-known Belgium-Flemish Tim Mielants directs. The adapted script is by Enda Walsh who wrote the script for the Steve McQueen film Hunger, and back in 1996, adapted his own play, Disco Pigs, in which Cillian Murphy stars.
It is the mid-1980s, New Ross, Ireland, where Bill Furlong (Murphy) toils away as a coal merchant who delivers coal everywhere, including to a convent and school.
Furlong lives with his wife Eileen (Eileen Walsh) and five daughters in a bustling, cosy home, as joyful as any home can be in this gloomy, grey town where everyone knows everyone else’s business, but dark secrets that should be outed are kept.
The expense of five daughters in the pursuit of one son might be Furlong’s cross to bear. But a flashback of precocious reader Billy (Louis Kirwan), disappointed that he gets a hot water bottle instead of a “difficult” crossword puzzle for Christmas, suggests another. Furlong could have escaped from New Ross if the sins of his mother hadn’t thwarted his chances for a good education.
These circumstances, and indeed the thread of an unfulfilled existence remain undeveloped in the film, but adult Bill Furlong goes through life accepting his lot, scrubbing the dirt from his hands every night as if to rub it in that he is a manual worker, not a Dicken’s scholar.
And, until he can do so no longer, Furlong accepts the goings on at the convent, overlooking, for the sake of his religious wife and daughters, what he sees and suspects when delivering coal there,
As he is reminded by the duplicitous villain, Sister Mary, the Convent’s Mother Superior (Emily Watson at her most sinister), if Furlong’s daughters have educational or job aspirations, they have to attend the convent school, and places are limited.
In case that blackmail doesn’t work, Sister Mary tries a bribe: she addresses a Christmas card to Furlong’s wife Eileen, and stuffs cash in it. Furlong at first refuses, then quietly takes the card.
You wonder what friends Bill can have in the town, or how he can bear the monotony of life, without external stimulation or entertainment, and full of small-minded conformists who warn him to keep quiet about the convent for his own safety. His family life might keep him too busy to notice the boredom, but he cannot help but notice the rot in the Catholic Church that dominates the town.
Murphy is such a good actor that we feel his angst as he tries to quell his conscience. And we sense his resolve when he can no longer pretend to himself that a girl locked in a freezing shed was a game of hide and seek gone wrong.
But something’s gone wrong with the story telling. Furlong’s personal, visceral connection to the convent is metered out in confusing flashbacks, depriving us of an emotional reaction. Who is Ned (Mark McKenna)? Is the man in the barber shop Billy’s father? Why doesn’t Billy’s mother’s kind, wealthy employer, who gives Billy Dicken’s novels, give Billy the crossword puzzle for Christmas? Why does a young woman, presumably Billy’s mother, suddenly collapse with blood around her mouth? And (not a flashback) who is the woman who comes out of a villa to speak to Furlong about someone in a care home?
Mielants attempts to direct the film with the same understatement that worked so well in Colm Bairéad’s The Quiet Girl, but unlike the latter, Small Things Like These feels self-consciously and purposefully miserable, grinding us down in the darkness of these repressed, stunted, and/or abused lives.
Some of the scenes, like the after-dinner chat between Furlong and Eileen, are so mumbled that older ears will be challenged, but everyone will love the battle of wills between Sister Mary and Furlong in the convent. This long, excruciatingly tense sequence gives the dramatic and narrative boost the film needs
But after all the newspaper articles, books (including one entitled The Body Snatchers: A mother’s shocking true story from inside one of Ireland’s notorious Mother and Baby Homes) and films like The Magdalene Sisters and Philomena starring Judi Dench, there is no shock or revelation for the audience, or for Furlong.
Instead, the cathartic ending, perfectly paced and shot, comes as a welcome relief, and a reward.
