Hal Kitchen
After winning the Best Actor Oscar for his lead role in the biggest film of 2023, following it up by starring in a dreary period-set drama about abuse within the Catholic Church in rural Ireland may seem like an odd choice. However, this is Cillian Murphy we’re talking about, and his has been a career defined more than anything by his belief in the virtues of his projects. He’s best known for his big roles in shows like Peaky Blinders and blockbusters like Inception, but I think the definitive Murphy role will always be The Wind That Shakes the Barley, and his turn in Small Things Like These is work in a similar vein, a realist, humanist drama exploring the painful history of his homeland, exactly the kind of film he might turn his newfound industry influence to. Small Things Like These was clearly a passion project not just for its leading man but for many others, his fellow big name co-stars Emily Watson and Michelle Fairley and executive producers Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, and if nothing else, the sincerity of everyone’s motives shines through its empathetic and quietly devastating character drama.
Murphy plays Bill Furlong, owner of a modest family-run coal delivery service in 1980s County Wexford, who finds himself at a crossroads when he discovers the draconican abuses of the local Madgalene asylum, dredging up painful memories of his own mother, who narrowly avoided such a place herself. For those unfamiliar with the nature of such convents, Small Things Like These will play out more like a mystery than a character drama. Magdalene asylums were, put simply, church-operated workhouses for young unmarried women who had become pregnant. Unable to access safe terminations, and not allowed to bring the stigma of unwed motherhood onto their families, such women were sent off to convents where they would serve out their pregnancies performing punitive work washing clothes until their newborn babies could be taken from them and sent off for adoption.
All this Small Things Like These takes this context as a given. It doesn’t go into the history of details of such institutions, but instead frames them as a backdrop to its character study of Bill, a man wrestling with buried grief and the unresolved traumas of his own upbringing, whose life is thrown into turmoil when a girl at the convent (Zara Devlin) pleads for his help escaping. Bill is a quiet, reserved man but not a stoic one. He’s got a soft heart and is prone to acts of compassion, when he’s able to perform them, but is held back by the hesitance instilled in him by his affection deprived childhood. He’s father to five girls and is justly proud of them, and there’s a beautiful little scene where he awkwardly fusses around his daughter at work, trying to make her comfortable. But he’s still very closed off and the central mystery of Small Things Like These lies not in the revelations of the cruelty down at the convent but of the specifics of the burdens and vulnerabilities Bill is carrying on his shoulders.
In this respect, the sacks of coal Bill lugs from van to door are one of several potent metaphors, as he tries to scrub the coal dust off his knuckles, trying to wash his hands of the moral duty weighing on him. You can definitely tell this was based on a novel—of the same name by Claire Keegan, whose novel The Quiet Girl was also recently adapted to screen to great acclaim—there’s a lot of those literary devices and many slow sequences where Bill grapples with his unspoken inner thoughts. The film asks a lot of Murphy, giving him little dialogue and leaving him to show his character’s conflict non-verbally, but fortunately he’s up to the challenge, giving a deeply compassionate portrait of a man starved of maternal affection and deeply wounded by the world, trying to repay it with kindness but unsure of how to proceed. He’s a good man, but timid and no one’s hero. He knows in his heart that what the convent is doing is wrong, but they would be a powerful enemy if he defied them, holding sway over not only the community’s moral compass but his daughters’ education.
Bill doesn’t feel powerful enough to summon the courage to do what he needs to do. He spent his whole life with the circumstances of his own birth and upbringing holding him back, the source of such shame and secrecy. He may have made a life to be proud of for himself as the head of a flourishing household, but it will never fully replace the one he lacked himself growing up. The film interleaves the 1985 timeline with flashbacks to Bill’s childhood, raised under the roof of a kindly wealthy patron (Michelle Fairley), and it does so so subtly that it took me an honestly embarrassing length of time to realize that these were actually flashbacks and not just a parallel narrative. In my defense, everybody was dressed like it was the 1950s anyway! Here we see the roots of Bill’s insecurity as the past continues to haunt him. He was loved, but not transparently, with no clear mother or father to acknowledge and guide him.
Murphy’s excellent performance is the backbone of the film, and he’s at least as good here as he was in Oppenheimer, but the supporting cast of women surrounding him are wonderful as well. Devlin is great in her handful of scenes and Emily Watson shows up for one of those one-scene-wonder performances as the Machiavellian mother superior whose every gentle word comes dipped in venom. Despite the brevity of her appearance she has already won the Silver Bear for Best Supporting Actress at the Berlin Film Festival for it. There’s a commendable sleight of hand to the direction as well, Tim Mielants does a superb job with the material, giving a disturbing and intrusive intimacy to many scenes. It’s strange that such a distinctly and unmistakably Irish story should be being told by a Belgian filmmaker, but he and cinematographer Frank van den Eeden show a clear understanding of and respect for the material.
Small Things Like These may be a dour and dreary film to watch. It’d be rare to find a character drama set in rural Ireland in the winter of 1985 about the abuses and influence of the Catholic Church that was a laugh riot or moved like a greyhound, but despite the fact that the somber, chilly and reflective tone is entirely appropriate, it may still turn off many viewers. I would certainly recommend seeing it in the cinema if opportunity allows, it would be most rewarding if allowed to truly absorb your senses without any distractions. There’s nothing casual about Small Things Like These, it’s a sensitive and studious portrait of its unlikely hero’s conflicted self. It could well be looked at as a companion piece to a film like You Were Never Really Here, exploring men’s pain with a rare feminist seriousness and gravitas tempered with raw feeling and tenderness.
