By Sandra Hall
SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE
Rated M
98 Minutes
In cinemas April 10
★★★★
Sally Rooney is not the only Irish writer to find favour with filmmakers. They have at last discovered Claire Keegan, who has been accumulating literary awards for years.
There’s no mystery in this. She writes with an elegant economy, possessing a knack for pinning down a character’s essential elements in a single sentence and placing them precisely amid the shapes and colours of the Irish landscape and the routines of Irish village life.
The Quiet Girl, a small jewel of a film adapted from Keegan’s novella, Foster, started her translation to the screen when it was nominated for a Best International Film Oscar in 2023. Now Small Things Like These, which made the Booker shortlist, has become a film. Its star is Peaky Blinders′ Cillian Murphy, a Keegan fan who’s also responsible for setting up the production, bringing on Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as co-producers.
Zara Devin and Cillian Murphy in Small Things Like These.Credit: Enda Bowe/Lionsgate
Murphy’s Bill Furlong is a fuel merchant in the 1980s in a town in County Wexford. He’s modestly successful but everything he owns has been achieved by hard graft. He still spends much of his time lugging bags of coal – part of a relentless daily round that provides plenty of reminders of his beginnings as the child of a single mother saved from homelessness by the kindness of a stranger.
His mother was hired as a housekeeper by Mrs Wilson (Michelle Fairley), a wealthy widow indifferent to the prejudices of the Catholic Church and the townspeople who share them. And when his mother died suddenly, young Bill was brought up by Mrs Wilson, leaving him with a heightened awareness of the importance of luck.
Bill doesn’t say much. He doesn’t have to. His thoughts can be read on Murphy’s face. Admittedly, he’s too handsome for the role but Bill’s slight stoop is a symptom of the work he does and he moves with caution, as if alert to the imminent possibility of things going horribly wrong.
Belgian director Tim Mielants makes these fears seem very real, bringing a strong sense of dread to the streets of the town. The church and the pub are full of goodwill, camaraderie and Christmas cheer, but Bill is one of the few who find it impossible to turn a blind eye to the kids he sees scavenging for food. Even his wife, Eileen (Eileen Walsh), views the poverty around them with a pragmatic acceptance.
Bill’s moment of truth arrives when he comes up against the formidable forces of the local convent, which takes in pregnant girls abandoned by their families to work in one of the church’s notorious Magdalene laundries.
One Christmas, he finds one of these girls locked in the convent’s coal shed, where she’s been for days, shivering with cold. From this point on, his conscience won’t let him rest.
The villain at the centre of the narrative is Sister Mary, the convent’s Mother Superior, although that makes her sound like a creature of melodrama, which is far from the truth. She’s played by Emily Watson, who erases all memory of the good women she’s given us in the past with a performance combining a silky air of self-satisfaction with the double-dealing skills of a Russian demagogue.
The ending is a little too abrupt for a film put together with such subtlety. Much is left unsaid, but if the script had gone any further, it would have had to embark on a sequel. What happens next is best left to your imagination.