A drama of tormented conscience, Small Things Like These cloaks a tough-minded story in the somber light of a forbidding Irish winter. In his first screen performances since his Oscar-winning turn in Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy directs his energies inward to play Bill Furlong, a family man who earns his living delivering coal to locals in the small town of New Ross.
Bill lives modestly with his wife (Eileen Walsh) and five daughters. By nature an observer, Bill eventually learns what's happening at the local convent, the place that houses both the town's Catholic school and one of Ireland's notorious Magdalene laundries, now-defunct institutions where abused unwed mothers provided unpaid labor.
A perfectly cast Murphy concentrates a growing sense of anguish in Bill's beneficent face as awareness of what transpires in the laundry takes its toll. At the end of each day's work, Bill scrubs his hands vigorously, a hard scrapple metaphor for trying to wash away sights that can't be unseen.
Set in 1989 during the week before Christmas, Small Things Like These employs flashbacks to shed light on Bill's past, a mixture of small disappointments and substantial grief. One Christmas, Bill’s mother gave him a hot water bottle instead of the jigsaw puzzle he wanted, but Bill’s real torment comes from knowing that his unwed single mother, who died young, barely escaped the Magdalene laundries.
Bill’s sensitivities were nourished by a woman (Michelle Fairley) who took Bill and his teenage mom underwing. Among other things, Fairley's Mrs. Wilson helped Bill develop an enduring taste for Dickens, an author who knew how to drown a story in a sea of troubles.
The plot conspires to bring Bill’s adult conscience to a boil when a young woman (Zara Devlin) who has been exiled to the laundry’s coal shed asks for help. Bill is moved but doesn’t know what to do.
The head nun (a terrific Emily Watson as Sister Mary) knows Bill has penetrated the convent’s "secret." She tries to salve Bill's conscience with a fat Christmas bonus.
Aware that money always presents a problem for her struggling family, Bill's wife encourages him to go along to get along. The town has spent years ignoring the laundry. No one wants to upset the prevailing order.
Mielants and screenwriter Enda Walsh aren't interested in big emotional effects. Spare as it is poignant, Small Things Like These turns a novel by Claire Keegan into a revealing big-screen story about one man who wrestles with the price of denial in a dreary town where most consider it wise to keep their eyes averted and their mouths shut.
