Right from the start, there is no doubt where we are. Narrow, gray streets in the dim daylight of winter, peat hills between cramped villages, a crow sitting on a church spire: this is western Ireland in the ’80s, when the Celtic Tiger was yet to roar and jobs were scarce, divorce was illegal, condoms available only on prescription and central heating unknown.
It is also the Ireland of the Magdalene laundries, businesses run jointly by Church and the Irish state where unwed mothers were consigned to repent of their sins, do hard labor for a living and ultimately deliver their babies for adoption. Academic research estimates that 35,000 women were forced into this service. Around 1,600 women and 6,000 babies are believed to have died behind the convents’ walls. Nobody — apparently — asked why. The last of these institutions closed only in 1996.
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In the Berlin Film festival opener Small Things Like These, adapted by Irish playwright Enda Walsh and Belgian director Tim Mielants from Claire Keegan’s much-feted novella, Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) is a coal merchant with five daughters and a small but thriving company that makes him an unspectacular but respectable living. When we encounter him, he is working even longer hours than usual to meet his orders before Christmas. The local convent, which runs both the local school for girls and a Magdalene laundry, is one of his customers. The story turns on a discovery Bill makes in the convent coal shed.
As far as that goes, the film tells the same story, while putting a different spin on Furlong himself. Keegan — whose writing is always a masterclass in tactful understatement, and inspired 2022 Oscar nominee The Quiet Girl — gives us the sense of a solid family man, well respected, kind to the urchin children of dissipated parents, outwardly content but nagged, as we all are, by the unspoken things in his past. When he recognizes what is being done to the girls at the convent in God’s name, he faces the dreadful wrench of a conventional man — and a father, responsible for his family’s welfare — compelled by his conscience to make uncharacteristic trouble.
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In the film, by contrast, Murphy gives us a man in constant, visible torment from the moment we meet him. By day, he is bent under sacks of coal; in the evenings, he scrubs savagely at his blackened hands at a washbasin off the hall before facing his clean, clever children. We glimpse him through doorways in their cramped terrace house, slumped with exhaustion. Far from being in retreat from memory, he need only stand by a rainy window to see his childhood emerging from the damp blur: his young unwed mother, the wealthy Protestant woman who took them in and encouraged him to read Dickens, a distant sunshine.
These are all elements of Keegan’s story — scriptwriter Walsh even uses much of the original dialogue, because how could he better it? — but weighted differently, squeezing the hope of the Christmas story out of it. The small things now add up to a trauma narrative, with Murphy’s soft features — which lent such complexity to his brilliant portrayal of Robert Oppenheimer — diligently registering 50 shades of pain. He’s cracking at every seam. You can’t believe he runs a business.
Bound up with this decision to shift the story trauma-side is the whole difficulty of turning prose — especially prose that is close to perfect — into moving pictures. How much to show? What to tell? Keegan describes physical details with precision but without melodramatic affect; when she says the convent is “powerful-looking,” with its black gates and tall windows, the reader may see it as threatening or simply solid. That is the flexible beauty of the mind’s eye.
The building that looms in Mielants’ film, by contrast, is the ecclesiastical equivalent of Bates Motel; in another kind of film, a ghost would erupt smokily out of the chimney. Indeed, the film only really springs into life when Bill, having rumbled something of what is going on with these unfortunate fallen girls, is trapped into taking tea and cake with the Mother Superior, played by Emily Watson. Together, they sit by a roaring fire while the Reverend Mother, knowing she is cornered, speaks softly of the difficulties of educating five daughters in a town with only one good girls’ school. So hard to find places for them all! The air hangs heavy with threat. Bill’s lips tremble, but he cannot speak.
Watson, always a powerful screen presence, brings an urgent sense of high stakes to these hitherto slow proceedings: she seems to vibrate with menace. Without ever slipping across the line of caricature into Cruella de Vil territory, she comes close enough to suggest what a vivid story this might have been if, rather than sticking to the letter of Keegan’s unadorned prose, Mielants and Walsh had embraced and taken a leap of faith into the story’s subtextual horror.
Those crystalline descriptions simply don’t work in the same way when given gray, soggy substance on screen. And without any dramatic tension to carry us along, we’re all just stuck knee-deep in the bog, trudging through the terrible facts of recent history.
Title: Small Things Like These
Festival: Berlin (Competition)
Director: Tim Mielants
Screenwriter: Enda Walsh (from the novel by Claire Keegan)
Cast: Cillian Murphy, Eileen Walsh, Michelle Fairley, Emily Watson, Clare Dunne
Sales agent: FilmNation on behalf of Artists Equity
Running time: 1 hr 36 min
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