“So, what do we have to answer for?” asks Eileen Furlong, played by Eileen Walsh.
Eileen is sitting with her husband Bill Furlong, played by Oscar-winner Cillian Murphy, in the warm, dim lighting of their bedroom. Their home is the picture of harmonic family life, glimpsed through scenes of their five young daughters doing their homework, baking a Christmas cake, and writing letters to Santa. Although the windows may need replacing, and money is carefully counted, the Furlong house is a haven from the harsh realities of life in Ireland in the 1980s.
“Don’t you ever question it?” Bill asks.
“If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore” Eileen replies.
The question of how much we are willing to ignore, forms the crux of Small Things Like These, directed by Tim Mielants and based on the novella by Claire Keegan. The film portrays a moment in time, Christmas in an Irish town in 1985, within a moment in history: the height of institutionalised mother and baby homes, which were responsible for the deaths of between ten to thirty thousand young Irish women. Following Bill Furlong in his work as a coal and timber merchant, the viewer is exposed to the poverty of Irish towns, as well as their desperate attempts to ignore their complicity in the atrocities committed by the Catholic Church to young, unmarried women and their babies.
Remaining faithful to Keegan’s novella throughout, the dialogue in the movie is similarly restrained to Keegan’s stripped back prose. Instead, Cillian Murphy effortlessly guides the reader through the film, precisely portraying Bill’s moral struggle through his facial expressions. In tandem with flashbacks from his childhood, the viewer begins to understand that Bill can’t just “ignore” what he is beginning to see. His own mother bore him out of wedlock, and he has five young daughters, who in different circumstances, might just as easily have fallen prey to men who would quickly use and discard them.
Mielants brilliantly executes the unravelling of the story. The viewer shares in Furlong’s uncovering of the mother and baby home and his growing horror, most vividly memorable in the repetition of Furlong scrubbing his hands increasingly desperately every time he gets home. Emily Watson, playing Sister Mary, brings the tension to a climax in her conversation with Bill, leaving the audience on the edge of their seat as Bill confronts the institutional power behind the suffering of the girls he encounters.
The film tenderly yet unflinchingly portrays the atrocities committed against women in Ireland until 1996—the atrocities which the Irish government only apologised for in 2014. Small Things Like These soars in its quiet power.
Illustration by Jennifer Tian
