Anna Maria O’Flanagan takes a look at Small Things Like These.
Small Things Like These is Enda Walsh’s film adaptation of Claire Keegan’s Booker-nominated novel of the same name. Set in New Ross during the final weeks leading up to Christmas, decay and poverty are to be seen everywhere in this small town, from the endless rows of shabby two up – two down terraced houses, to the dank alleyways just around the corners of streets lit with festive lights.
It is through those streets and alleyways that Bill Furlong threads each day. As the town’s coal merchant, he is known to be a fair and generous employer, working hard to earn enough money to keep his family fed and a respectable roof over their heads. The coal yard which he owns occupies a masculine space where men banter as they lift heavy sacks of coal and turf, chopping wood into kindle to deliver to homes which still rely on open fires as their main source of heat. From the start, Furlong is established as an outsider, not really a part of the male camaraderie that surrounds him. Instead, he seems more comfortable in the solitude of his own lorry as he makes his deliveries across the bridge and later walking home alone, slipping quietly into the house to join his wife and daughters who chat to each other around the kitchen table as the girls do their homework. Despite his contented home life, there is an air of melancholy about him.
On one of his usual delivery rounds, he passes the secondary school his older daughters attend to deliver coal to the convent next door. With his coal blackened face, he stands unnoticed in the shadows of the coal shed and witnesses a young girl being forcibly led by her mother into the care of the nuns. There is a sense that this is not the first time he has seen such a thing happen but perhaps because his eldest daughter is of the same age as the young girl, it triggers the memory of his own young mother and forces him to reflect on his difficult childhood.
Tim Mielants’ direction allows the narrative of the film to quietly unfold. Framed within the damp, drizzled windscreen of his lorry or in front of the narrow window of his sitting room, we see Furlong observing the harsh realities of the world that surrounds him. Frank van den Eeden’s colour palette of rust browns set against a soupy tangerine light creates a claustrophobic, oppressive mood, while his grey steel blues reflect not only a cold desolate winter but also a bleak economic landscape.
This is an Irish society in which the church still has the country in its grip, due in no small part to a State that has deferred the welfare of its citizens to its control. People are no longer blinded by an unquestioning faith but are silenced into appeasement by the knowledge that to survive in such an inhospitable environment; you need to know what side your bread is buttered. In practical terms, this translates in people going about their daily lives, keeping their heads down with an anxious determination not to disturb the status quo and looking the other way should something unspeakable occur. On a deeper level, it involves the power of the church to infiltrate the most intimate, personal spaces of family and home, casting its shadow over how people love, influencing the way neighbour treats neighbour and directing the choices an individual makes or doesn’t make.
Although it is an urban space, this is a world away from Dublin and a universe away from the more cosmopolitan cities of London, New York, or Boston, where many of the town’s youth will eventually emigrate. The latest chart-hits may play on the radio waves and British television programmes may be routinely broadcast into the sitting rooms of every house, but for all that, it is almost like time has remained still. It could just as easily be the 1950s or 1930s as it is the bleak 1980s.
Furlong’s wife, Eileen, epitomises the widespread mindset of the town. Her priority is her family, especially her girls, for whom she holds aspirations for a better future by way of a good education which will lift them out of their working-class background into the more prosperous middle class. She argues with her husband that empathy for strangers is a luxury only the wealthy can afford to indulge in and views his generosity almost as a weakness resulting from an upbringing in which he was exposed to such privilege. Adhering to the church’s black and white morality, she is intolerant of misfortune, viewing it as having its roots in reckless behaviour. Furlong’s fear that one of his own daughters could end up on the wrong side of the convent wall is downplayed by her, assuring him that such a thing won’t happen to their family.
Furlong spends his day surrounded by men, but he is really a man set amongst women. From his own unmarried mother and the mother figure of the childless Mrs Wilson to the mother of his own daughters, the mother in all its various guises is viewed through the prism of Cillian Murphy’s piercing blue eyes. At the very apex, is the mother of them all, Sister Mary, the Mother Superior of the convent who manages and supervises the secondary education of the town’s teenage girls and into whose care the unwanted teenage mothers of the community are delivered.
Enda Walsh’s dialogue is as sparse and as lean as Keegan’s own prose. We are taken to a place where nothing is ever explicitly said but where everything is silently understood. Furlong carries the heavy burden of that oppressive silence on his hunched-up shoulders and in the slow drag of his feet as he makes his way home each night. We glimpse his anguish in the private moments as he drives along the lonely country roads that surround the town or wanders through his house under the darkness of night. There are no big set pieces, no big dramatic moments, just a haunting unravelling of a man trying to navigate his deeply buried grief.
As Christmas draws nearer, his retrospective grief intensifies, his behaviour becoming more unpredictable; enough for the local pub owner to warn him to be careful, that the nuns have their fingers in every pie, including the future prospects of his own daughters. Yet Furlong is compelled to push against the prevailing thinking to exercise his past despite the destruction it will impose on his future.
Murphy’s emotionally complex performance is matched by Emily Watson as the Mother Superior, whose steely stare is violent in its silent power, while Eileen Walsh delivers a nuanced portrayal of a woman holding together her family with a determination that stems from love and is coloured by hardship. This is not a story about what goes on behind closed doors but is a story about what happens outside those doors: the quiet complicity, the deliberate ignorance, the simply not wanting to know. It’s about open secrets that infect a society, damaging the most vulnerable and instilling a fear into the majority of what could happen if one chooses to step out of line.
There are no easy answers. As the film cuts to black, we can guess the repercussions not only for Furlong himself but also for those closest to him.
In cinemas 1st November 2024.