Cillian Murphy won Oscar for last year’s “Oppenheimer” and he’s been doing extraordinary work for nearly 25 years, but I’m not sure Murphy has ever been more exceptional than he is in the quietly powerful masterpiece that is “Small Things Like These.” It is a performance that feels authentic to the bone, a piece of minimalist acting that avoids any attention-getting mannerisms or flamboyant tics or thundering speechifying. Murphy’s work, and the film itself, will leave you feeling shaken, but also grateful for the viewing experience.
The setting for “Small Things Like These” is the quiet town of New Ross in County Wexford, Ireland, and the year is 1985, though were it not for the glimpses of a TV set in a living room or the sounds of “Come On Eileen” by Dexys Midnight Runners playing at a local pub, it might as well be the 1930s. We get the feeling this place has changed little through the decades; no doubt those omnipresent church bells have been ringing for a very long time.
Murphy’s Bill Furlong is a taciturn and exceedingly decent family man who runs a coal and fuel business, driving his rickety but trusty yellow pickup truck through long and rainy days, hunching his back and bending his legs as he hoists one heavy sack of coal after another onto his shoulders. On a regular stop to the Good Shepherd Convent, Bill witnesses a devastating scene: a teenage girl pleading and begging with her mother to not leave her at this place, to not force her to go inside with the nuns, to no avail.
The mid-1980s setting is key here, as we are still a few years away from the closing of the notorious “Magdalene Laundries,” sometimes known as the Magdalene Asylums, where tens of thousands of “fallen young women” were sent for so-called “penance and rehabilitation.” The whole town knows of the suffering endured by these girls behind the closed walls of the convent, but little is said, and nothing is ever done about it.
When Bill finds a freezing and distraught young mother named Sarah (Zara Devlin) in a coal shed and she pleads for his help in escaping the convent, Bill is faced with an existential crisis. At first, he feels it’s best to return the girl to the care of the icy Mother Superior (a suitably terrifying Emily Watson), but he has been shaken to the core, and memories of his own childhood keep him awake at night.
In flashback sequences with Lewis Kirwan playing the young Bill, we learn that Bill’s mother was a pregnant teen who was able to avoid the Magdalene Laundries through the kindness and care of a well-off woman named Mrs. Wilson (Michelle Fairley), who took Bill in and raised him as her own after Bill’s mother suddenly died. In present day, Bill’s loving wife Eileen (Eileen Walsh) tells him that he can’t save everyone. (She knows Bill’s a soft touch; when he recounts how he gave a few coins to the son of a local man, she scolds him and says, “He’s never not drunk, that man,” to which Bill replies, “We don’t know that, love. He might be trying.”)
With the town hearing whispers that Bill has had some interactions with the sisters at the convent and might be getting involved with helping a girl, pub owner Mrs. Kehoe (Helen Behan) takes Bill aside and says, “It’s no affair of mine, but you’d want to watch what you say. … Those nuns have a finger in every pie, Bill. We can be sure about that.”
The implications are clear. If Bill “makes trouble,” the nuns might take their coal business elsewhere and direct others to do the same, and the future education of his five daughters could also be put at risk. Still, as Bill reminds his wife, if not for Mrs. Wilson, his mother would have wound up at a Magdalene laundry; what would have become of her, and what would have become of him?
Directed with precision and Dickensian visual touches by Tim Mielants, with Enda Walsh adapting Claire Keegan’s novel of the same name, “Small Things Like These” hits every note with perfection. When Bill comes home at night, as sore as a rugby player after a rough match, he vigorously scrubs the coal from his hands in a hallway bathroom before joining his wife and the girls, who are always in the kitchen, baking a Christmas cake or working on homework assignments or playing cards. It is a home filled with love and joy, and though Bill often looks as he carries the weight of the world with him, he is grateful for this life. He can’t rescue everyone in that convent, but maybe there’s room for one more girl around that kitchen table.
With Cillian Murphy’s quiet, almost small and yet grand performance carrying the story every step of the way, “Small Things Like These” is quite possibly the best movie I’ve seen so far this year.