Availability: Opened Nov. 8 in theaters nation-wide; Nov. 1 in the UK; streaming not expected anytime soon. Released by Lionsgate and distributed by Roadside Attractions, it likely will stream on Starz but not until Spring 2025. See JustWatch here for future streaming availability.
The Story Starts When the Film Ends
Bill Furlong is a mostly silent, hard-working man, eking out a living for his wife and five girls as a coal distributor in a small town in Ireland in 1985. The sources of his discontent are those who are less fortunate than he: the boy collecting sticks far from home, whose father is a drunk; the girls trapped in the Magdalene laundries—church-run “homes” for unwed mothers.
Right, Cillian Murphy, who creates an indelible character as the “soft-hearted” Bill, as his pragmatic wife calls him. “It’s best not to see things,” she cautions.
Cillian Murphy creates an indelible character as the “soft-hearted” Bill, as his pragmatic wife (Eileen Walsh) calls him. “It’s best not to see things,” she cautions. Murphy’s Bill Furlong is poles apart from his Oscar-winning Robert Oppenheimer, whose larger-than-life appetites and uncontained charisma tainted his scientific achievements. What Furlong and Oppenheimer share is moral complexity. They are men cutting against the grain of their cohorts, men trying to act on their own deeply held beliefs while, perhaps unwittingly, damaging those around them.
Sister Agnes, portrayed with the iciness of a killer by Emily Watson, both threatens Bill (with preventing his girls from attending the convent school—the only good school in town) and bribes him.
Without wanting to, Bill takes on no less than the Catholic Church. In a chilling scene, he faces Sister Agnes, the Mother Superior of the convent that harbors “wayward women,” among them unwed mothers, taking their babies and using them as slave labor in the laundries. (In 2013 the Irish government issued a formal apology for the laundries and described them as “the nation’s shame,” similar to US President Biden’s apology last month for the Native American schools he deemed “a blot on American history.”) Sister Agnes, portrayed with the iciness of a killer by Emily Watson (who won a Best Supporting Actress award at the Berlin International Film Festival for this role), both threatens Bill (with preventing his girls from attending the convent school—the only good school in town) and bribes him (giving him an envelope of bills she has counted out in front of him for his wife as a Christmas gift). In a kind of battle of wills, her goal is to coerce him into ceasing his feeble attempts to help one of the young girls committed there by her parents.
Bill's pragmatic wife (Eileen Walsh, left) cautions him "not to see things."
Claire Keegan, author of the eponymous book on which the film is based, is masterful at probing the moral core not only of individuals but of the communities in which they live. It’s not just Bill’s wife who tells him he must look away. He’s also told by a café owner, “the nuns have their hands in everything….People are talking.” Keegan shatters the notion of an idyllic small-town community. Everyone is morally compromised. She lets no one off the hook. Not even the morally certain Bill.
Sister Agnes (Emily Watson) can manufacture a passive face, but inside she's ruthless.
On an evening before Christmas, Bill walks the town main street, splurges on a pair of shoes for his wife, sees a jigsaw puzzle in a store window—recalling the Christmas gift he desperately wanted and didn’t receive as a boy—and then reflects on the girl he found locked in the convent coal shed in the dead of winter. Will Bill rescue the girl, and if he does, what impact will that have on his family and their livelihood?
Keegan leaves more to the reader’s imagination; her less is more.
The script by Enda Walsh is replete with flashbacks of Bill’s youth and upbringing by a single mother, his ostracism and poverty. In the book—at 116 pages the shortest ever included on the Booker Prize Shortlist—Keegan leaves more to the reader’s imagination; her less is more. Walsh and Belgian director Tim Mielants also employ the metaphor of handwashing, recalling Lady MacBeth. Bill says little but is constantly—maybe too often—washing the coal black from his hands.
“Small Things Like These” does not rise to the level of “The Quiet Girl,” the Gaelic-language film nominated for a 2023 International Feature Film Oscar, based on Keegan’s “Foster.” Despite the quibbles we have with the script and directing, the acting is superb, and Keegan’s exploration of moral dilemmas—especially those of flawed men—leaves one contemplating life’s quandaries and often, as Murphy said he did on reading “Foster,” crying.
She says: The film is good; the book is better.
He says: Ireland's ugly underbelly, revealed.
Date: 2024
Director: Tim Mielants
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Emily Watson, Eileen Walsh
Country: Ireland (also Belgium and United States)
Language: English
Runtime: 98 minutes
Other Awards: 1 win and 2 other nominations to date
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