Small Things Like These review: Cillian Murphy is in the form of his life
Cillian Murphy as Bill Furlong in Small Things Like These. Picture: Enda Bowe
★★★★★
Christian instinct meets Catholic hegemony in Small Things Like These (12A), which opens in New Ross in 1985 with Christmas flying in.
An unassuming husband to Eileen (Eileen Walsh) and father to a devoted brood of young daughters, Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) runs a coal yard on very tight margins in a grey, drab town that appears to be the dictionary definition of functioning poverty.
Steady and hard-working in his woollen hat and donkey jacket, the softly-spoken Bill is an unlikely rebel – until, on a routine delivery to the convent that overlooks the town, Bill makes the shocking discovery of a terrified young girl, Sarah (Zara Devlin), consigned to the coal shed.
New Ross is 1980s Ireland in a microcosm; everyone knows of the Magdalene Laundry that runs behind the convent’s walls; and everyone knows the old Irish advice of whatever you say, say nothing.
But Bill experienced his fair share of hardship as a vulnerable child, as we discover in flashback; as an adult our unwitting Good Samaritan is a man given to small charities, easy forgiveness and doing unto others as you would have done unto yourself.
When his pragmatic wife, fearful of what Bill might do, asks ‘What do we have to answer for?’, Bill realises that, for him, the question has already been answered.
Adapted by Enda Walsh from Claire Keegan’s novella, and directed by Tim Mielants, Small Things Like These finds Cillian Murphy in the form of his life – no small feat, given that he won the Oscar for his role in last year’s Oppenheimer.
But where Oppenheimer was storytelling on a vast canvas, Small Things is a miniature where every tiny detail counts, and Murphy delivers a masterclass in how to reveal a roiling interiority behind a mask of forbearance.
The smallest facial tics or flinches detonate off the screen, and particularly in the scenes he shares with Emily Watson, who is deliciously sinister as the basilisk-like Sister Mary, a genteel but formidable presence who delicately bends the town to her iron will.
If there’s a caveat it’s that New Ross more resembles Ireland in the 1960s rather than the 1980s, a brief glimpse of some Rubik Cubes notwithstanding; otherwise, this is a small masterpiece lit from within by Murphy’s exquisitely restrained evocation of a quietly defiant courage that is light years removed from Hollywood’s concept of a hero.
(theatrical release)
