Small Things Like These: from Novella to Screen

A film review by Arti

Here’s an interesting fact: Claire Keegan’s books Foster (2010) and Small Things Like These (2020), both have 128 pages. While short as standalone books, both novellas exemplify Keegan’s style of writing: sparse descriptions that carry powerful punches. I’m glad to note that their film adaptations are worthy productions akin to her style, quiet, nuanced, and poignant. Foster was made into the film The Quiet Girl in 2022. (My review here). Small Things Like These is newly released, directed by Tim Mielants and starring Cillian Murphy, following his Oscar role as Oppenheimer.

Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer) is a coal merchant in an Irish town. It’s Christmas time, cold and snowy, after the dirty lifting of heavy bags of coal, the devoted husband and father comes back to a warm household, wife Eileen (Eileen Walsh) has supper ready and his five girls make up the chirpy harmony of home. The uneventful routine is disrupted one day when Bill makes his delivery to the local convent, witnessing a rough handling of a teenage girl being shoved into the entrance of the Catholic institution. Another time, when he stepped into the building to deliver his invoice, a girl scrubbing the floor comes up to him begging him to take her away. The next time he makes his delivery, he finds the girl locked inside the coal storage, dirty and shivering in cold.

The Magdalene Laundries were institutions operated by the Roman Catholic orders to house ‘fallen women’, asylums notorious for their abuse of the young women there, unpaid workhouses doing laundries for profit, unwed mothers have their babies forcibly taken away to be adopted. There have been features and TV series on this subject but the most exposure for viewers outside the UK is probably the movie Philomena (2013) starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan. The note at the end of the movie explains the historic context, dedicating it to the more than 56,000 young women who were sent to the institutions between 1922 and 1998 for purpose of “penance and rehabilitation.”

Following his Best Actor Oscar win as physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer whose work, albeit not fully within his control, had affected the result of World War II, here in Small Things, Murphy is equally effective in his portrayal of a coal deliverer, fighting an internal war of conflict, a moral dilemma, to act upon his conscience thereby counteracting an institution that is all powerful in his town, or just to keep silent and do nothing to safeguard the wellbeing of his family. His wife says to him clearly like a warning, considering his soft heart: “If you want to get on in life, there are things you have to ignore.”

Bill’s past is interposed with his present throughout the film, for he was orphaned as a child but was raised by a loving woman. The compassionate upbringing he received could well have formed his sensitivity towards other’s suffering. Murphy’s performance of a troubling soul is heart wrenching, nuances captured aptly by closeups. Another frequent closeup shot is his handwashing after coming home from work, cleaning with soap and brushing out the black coal soots in his hands almost obsessively, a visual telling of his reluctance to join in the darkness of the world.

It’s small things like these, courageous acts by a common man despite social pressures and the negative consequences for his own family that make Bill a heroic figure. All five of his daughters need to get a good education in the Catholic-run system in town. To be at odds with Sister Mary (Emily Watson) is to have the door shut on his girls in terms of education and a good future. All these details are readily available as one reads Keegan’s book, but for those who have no contextual background before watching the film, such consequences of Bill’s moral dilemma may not be so easily grasped by the viewer. The film does drop hints in a few dialogues and subtly in certain scenes. For a 98-minute feature, more elaboration to denote these issues could be helpful in terms of the congruence of the storytelling and especially in magnifying the price Bill has to pay for his courageous act of compassion.

Overall, a worthy adaptation of Keegan’s novella. Come awards time later this year, I hope to see Murphy being acknowledged for his performance here. It’s small films like this that make cinema arts gratifying aesthetically and meaningful socially in our world that needs constant critique and reflection.