The Irish novelist Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These was really a parable, written in the same quietly angry, unavoidably poetic, deeply detailed fashion that Vladimir Nabokov once described as “lucid Joyce.” It is dominated by interior monologue, with a smattering of action. A film? One assumed the novel was unfilmable. One, as happens, was wrong.
Remaining as faithful to a book as a filmmaker can ever bring himself to be, Tim Mielants transfigures 1986 Ireland—it may as well be 1956—into precisely the kind of iron-gray world described by Ms. Keegan, the world in which Bill Furlong, the Wexford coalman and heart of the story, finds it so hard to steady his waffling Christianity. It may not replace “Die Hard” as some viewers’ favorite Christmas movie, but it is quickly becoming mine.
It is, in fact, Christmastime in the villages along the Barrow River, where Bill lives with his five daughters and wife, Eileen (Eileen Walsh), a classic Irish character—put-upon, strong, not at all submissive to her husband but devotedly submissive to the church. She knows, while Bill does not, that something scandalous and cruel is going on at the convent on the hill, a client of Bill’s and run by the forbidding Sister Mary (Emily Watson).
It may be, as claimed, an education facility for wayward girls. Or a Magdalene laundry, a mother-baby home from which the infants are being shipped out for adoption, to the financial gain of the religious order and the lasting misery of the girls. Bill finds one girl locked in the coal bin one morning—filthy, freezing and her hair cut as if by a blind man with shears, as Ms. Keegan put it. Bill’s passion, as it might be described, has begun.
From the moment we see Cillian Murphy’s face—downward-looking, unassuming, a bit haggard and about to share a meal with his workers at a local bar—we’re watching a transformative performance. If the last you saw Mr. Murphy was as a razor-toting Peaky Blinder, the one close-up is startling enough.
As Bill makes his way around town and, more importantly, through his memories, his quietude roars, his childhood grows more disturbing: The illegitimate son of a housemaid, he was spat upon by schoolmates and sneered at by adults—with the exception of Mrs. Wilson (Michelle Fairley, “Game of Thrones”), the Protestant landowner who takes in both Bill and his mom (Agnes O’Casey), and with whom he grows up.
Shy, self-effacing, hard-working and dutiful as an adult, Bill is unnerved by the starving, scrubbing, even suicidal state of the pregnant girls living at the convent and the fate of their babies. Bill is a man of few words, but Mr. Murphy proves himself an actor of abundant internal emotion, even combustion.
Tim Mielants might not have seemed the obvious choice to direct playwright/screenwriter Enda Walsh’s adaptation of the book. (One of Mielants’s earlier films is summarized as follows: “A bereaved nudist campsite handyman finds himself on an existential quest as he attempts to recover his missing favorite hammer.”) But his instinct is to do less, which leads to marvelously moving scenes, such as one in which Bill simply stares out a window at night, watching Wexford as if it were a TV.
Keegan describes Bill thus:
He’d stand at the window then, with the cup in his hand, looking down at the streets and what he could see of the river, at the little bits and pieces of goings on: stray dogs out foraging for scraps in the bins; chipper bags and empty cans being rolled and blown roughly about by the driving wind and rain; stragglers from the pubs, stumbling home. Sometimes these stumbling men sang a little. Other times, Furlong would hear a sharp, hot whistle and laughter, which made him tense. He imagined his girls getting big and growing up, going out into that world of men. Already he’d seen men’s eyes following his girls. But some part of his mind was often tense; he could not say why.
It is the tension that everyone gets right—Mr. Murphy especially, but also Senjan Jansen with his score (plus some snippets of ‘80s pop that affirm our position in time) and the cinematography by Frank van den Eeden, which is the type that never wins Oscars because there are no mountains or valleys or spaceships. There is, however, soul.
While it seemed more evident in the movie than the book, Small Things Like These is also about the male-female dynamic and the fear of women, not just the nuns.
“They could be like young witches sometimes his daughters, with their black hair and sharp eyes,” Ms. Keegan writes. “It was easy to understand why women feared men with their physical strength and lust and social powers, but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come long before it came, dream it overnight, and read your mind. He’d had moments, in his marriage, when he’d almost feared Eileen and had envied her mettle, her red-hot instincts.”
Bill’s fear of doing right may be less about the church, in fact, than it is the person of Sister Mary (Ms. Watson is fearsome) and her subtle threats about his daughters’ education. Or his wife, who is all about going along to get along. Doing the righteous thing is about not going along, of course. That’s the simple message of “Small Things Like These,” which is, like the book, dedicated to the girls and babies who went through the homes, the last of which closed in 1996.
In 2024, there is coal in our Christmas movie stocking. And we should all feel blessed.
“Small Things Like These” is in theaters now.
