Small Things Like These

Cillian Murphy

I enjoyed the film adaptation of Claire Keegan's novel Small Things Like These more than I expected to, if enjoyment is not quite the right word for a work concerning the depravations of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries. Set in 1982 or so, both film and book concern a simple and honest lorry driver named Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) who discovers dark secrets about the local church run facility while making his deliveries. The laundries employed and sheltered Ireland's unmarried mothers who were forced to give away their babies for adoption. The laundries were Dickensian work houses, David Copperfield figures prominently in Small Things Like These, that became satanic mills of abuse and exploitation. Screenwriter Enda Walsh has streamlined the novel, yet retained its very Gaelic flavor.

What worried me about the material is that there is no subtext, book and film are both righteous screeds against the Laundries. Fair enough, but not necessarily the stuff of multi-dimensional art. However, the film is superbly acted by all concerned and director Tim Mielants' technique is interesting and evocative. He conjures the period by giving the film a throwback look and audio design. The colors are muted, appropriate for this grim tale of the 1980s. The sound is multi-layered and scratchy like an old cassette mixtape. Furlong is constantly going back in time within his head to revisit his troubled childhood. Mielants includes many shots of characters looking through windows conveying how we are constantly rewitnessing the past, but are forever cut off from it. The past is a foreign country as L.P. Hartley put it. Mielants uses long and slow pans to give the viewer a queasy sense that some undiscovered horror is just around the corner or in a disused coal bin. Furlong is a virtual saint, devoted to his wife and five daughters. We have little doubt that he will do the right thing even if he has to oppose his beloved church. As in Oppenheimer, Murphy underplays beautifully in what was a pet project for him. Emily Watson delivers in the juicy role of the Mother Superior who personifies the corruption and hypocrisy of the Catholic clergy.