“Small Things Like These”: Cillian Murphy Versus the Horrid Nuns of Ireland
Oppenheimer has been lifting weights lately, trading in the mentally taxing toting of nuclear secrets for the bit-more physically challenging conveyance of sacks of coal. His recipients: the inhabitants of New Ross in County Wexford, Ireland. The year: 1985.
Yes, in Cillian Murphy’s first post-bomb effort, Small Things Like These, the doleful eyes of the Oscar-winning actor work hard to express the troubled interiority of Billy Furlong, a coal merchant delivering his goods to both the financially well-off and the making-do. Alas, on his daily route, while in his faithful yet challenged truck, the “happily” married dad and father of five daughters inescapably drives past townspeople with little mettle left to struggle by. A Dickensian lot, you might say.
Well, the times were tough for many in 1985 in Ireland . . . and elsewhere.
Why on one chilly night, Billy even comes upon a shoeless lad frantically lapping up milk from a bowl left outdoors for a cat. The ragged urchin looks up for a second, spots the eyewitness to his lactose thievery, but deciding Billy’s no threat, continues on with his meal.
Can Billy block out what he doesn’t want to see? Why is he so troubled by the misery bypassing his own kin who are getting by quite nicely? And didn’t his wife (Eileen Walsh) recently advise: “If you want to get on with this life, there are things you have to ignore.”
If this plotline sounds familiar, you have might have already read Claire Keegan’s bestselling novella from which the film is faithfully adapted. Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and #41 on The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, Keegan’s Small Things is a superb, quick read with a hero worthy of James Joyce’s Dubliners’ description: “He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances.”
How did our gentleman get that way? Blame it on childhood, a curse many of us have had to live through.
Accordingly, the film, as does it source, jumps back and forth in time chronicling Billy’s troubled youth that his adult self can’t shake off. His mother Sarah, a maid, had him out of wedlock in a heavily Catholic area where such repellent behavior was far from condoned. If it weren’t for her compassionate Protestant employer, the widow Mrs. Wilson (Michelle Fairley), who gave Sarah and son a home to reside in, Billy is aware he himself might have become a midnight scourer of pet bowls.
You see, there was a century or two where the “fallen women” in his mother’s unwed condition were often forced into institutions run by Roman Catholic nuns. Known as the Magdalene Laundries, the imprisoned, underfed pregnant souls there were brutalized and forced to work at all hours laundering the niceties of the rich.
As Kegan notes in the afterword to her book: “Many girls and women lost their babies. Some lost their lives. Some or most lost the lives they could have had. It is not known how many thousands of infants died in these institutions or were adopted from the mother-and-baby homes. Earlier this year [2021], the Mother and Baby Home Commission Report found that nine thousand children died in just eighteen of the institutions invesigated.” The last workhouse of horrors was not closed until 1996. Thirty thousand women might have been subjected this form of slavery. Some insist the fugure is much higher.
History.com’s “How Ireland Turned ‘Fallen Women” into Slaves” shares: “Often, women’s names were stripped from them; they were referred to by numbers or as ‘child’ or ‘penitent.’ Some inmates — often orphans or victims of rape or abuse — stayed there for a lifetime; others escaped and were brought back to the institutions. . . . In 2014, remains of at least 796 babies were found in a septic tank in [one] home’s yard.”
One day while delivering fuel to one such workhouse, Billy, from a distance, sees a mother dragging her screaming pregnant daughter into the hands of the nuns. This chance encounter will transform his life.
Small Things Like These is a more than timely tale of a moral man who can’t turn a blind eye to anguish he sees outside his door. For Billy Furlong, just feeling empathy for his fellow man is not enough. He is being eaten up by the indifference he’s confronted by. Beware of upsetting the Church he is warned. You have five daughters in a world of victimizers. Are his girls safe on the streets? At night he lies on his bed staring at his steadfast wife. He is blessed but not at peace.
With Murphy as Billy, you can’t help but feel the coal merchant’s unending sadness that he tries to hide as his family prepares for Christmas, an overwhelming local celebration. Often the residual effects of his inner battle comes out when he returns home, enters the bathroom, and scrubs away at the black grime encasing his hands. Lady Macbeth scrubbed not harder.
Clearly, Murphy is one of those actors who envelopes himself in a part so completely that when offscreen, we are still aware of what he’s thinking, of his stance, of his reaction to what is before us.
With his seductive angularity, his throbbing intensity, and with those singular orbs of his, Murphy believably transforms a man who might have remained a helpless onlooker at the world’s indifference to those in need into a Warrior of Hope.
With the addition of Tim Mielants’s (Peaky Blinders) spare, perfect direction, Enda Walsh’s singular screenplay, Maureen Hughes’s spot-on casting, Frank van den Eeden’s spectacularly transportive cinematography, and Emily Watson’s vicious head nun for which she won a Silver Berlin Bear for Best Supporting Performance, Small Things Like These is a change-of-pace stand-in for It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s certainly making my annual holiday viewing list.
