THE film Small Things Like These (Cert. 12A), adapted from Claire Keegan’s acclaimed novella, might seem yet another account of the infamous Magdalene convents. Pregnant, unmarried Irish girls gave birth there before their children were taken away. In effect, that is only really a sideshow. Keegan takes up Chekhov’s dictum “When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace.”
That person is Bill Furlong, played with excruciating intensity by Cillian Murphy. He runs a coal business in New Ross, County Wexford. Devoted to his wife, Eileen (Eileen Walsh), and five daughters, he just about subsists. Like other residents, his family are beholden to the Roman Catholic Church for access to benefits such as education. Bill’s small acts of kindness to others alarms his pragmatic wife, realising only too well the convent’s power. She tells him: “If you want to get on in life there are things you have to ignore.” He can’t.
He befriends Lisa (Abby Fitz), a girl terrified by the nuns’ treatment. The man’s good-heartedness isn’t primarily spectacular: just small things like lending his jacket after the girl is locked in the coal cellar. The pub landlady also warns him against contending with a Church’s institutional abuse. “Surely they’ve only as much power as we give them?” Bill asks in his quiet repressed manner.
He himself is illegitimate, saved from adoption by his mother’s affluent Protestant employer. Even there, he felt an outsider, especially after being orphaned. Memories haunt him. Words are superfluous. Thanks to close-ups, it is all there in Murphy’s face. This man of sorrows bears the sins of both Church and nation.
The film begins with church bells. Flashback reveals the young Bill (Louis Kirwan) reading the passages in A Christmas Carol in which Scrooge resolves to embrace the spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. Dickens again features when the adult Bill asks Eileen for David Copperfield as his Christmas present, reminding him of his own upbringing. Unlike that particular author, however, the Belgian director Tim Mielants doesn’t hammer home moral certainty. We note the irony of the town’s manger celebrating Christ’s birth by an unmarried mother. Also, the fervently held beliefs of a steely Sister Mary (Emily Watson), who tries bribing Bill to remain silent about what he witnessed in the coal shed.
Contrast this with when, later, in church she recites a passage from Psalm 103 proclaiming the Lord as compassionate and gracious, one who does not treat us as our sins deserve. The scene insinuates how complicit the congregation is in ecclesiastical oppression. Even so, this new film avoids the outright hostility of The Magdalen Sisters (Arts, 11 January 2011) or the whimsy of Philomena (Arts, 1 November 2013). Perhaps there will be one day a film that helps us to understand better why these religious behaved in such an appalling manner to their charges, more than 56,000 of them during the last century.
Small Things Like These rises above an accusatory tone by empathising with the journey of a man’s soul. It is a film pondering how it will all end.
On general release