Small Things Like These (12A) |Close-Up Film Review
Cast: Cillian Murphy, Emily Watson, Eileen Walsh
Review by Carol Allen
Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) is an ordinary man living in a small town in Ireland in the 80s. He has his own business as a coal merchant and he works hard to support his wife and five daughters. The town is of course dominated by the Catholic Church and the nearby convent.
One day, when delivering coal to the convent, he sees a young girl screaming “I’m not going”, as she is being dragged by an older woman through the convent doors. Later when he has business briefly inside the convent, he comes across another young woman scrubbing the floor, who pleads with him to help her and is swiftly removed by the nuns. And then shortly before Christmas, he finds that same young woman, cold and dirty, locked in the convent coal shed and calling for her baby.
It’s rare to find a male character in a film as empathetic and caring as Bill Furlong. And Cillian Murphy, in a very different role from the ones which have made him famous, plays him to perfection. He’s a man of few words but his face and bearing are that of a man who feels life deeply, a man of conscience. He also has issues of his own to deal with in terms of his childhood as the son of an unmarried young woman, who raised him with the support of her female Protestant employer. Without that help, his own mother, he comes to realise, could have ended up in the same situation as the young woman in the coal cellar.
The other performances match Murphy’s, including Eileen Walsh as his wife, sometimes exasperated by her husband’s generosity to those less fortunate and Emily Watson as the convent’s mother superior, whose ruthless iron will shows clearly through her assumed mask of caring and compassion.
Writer Enda Walsh’s screenplay is very faithful to the novel, while Tim Mielant’s direction has a wonderful sense of the texture of the story – the cramped house in which the family live; the washbasin in which Bill washes off the coal dust; the heaviness of those coal sacks. And the biting chill of the weather in this small town approaching Christmas. It all adds up to a very engrossing and moving film.
