Small Things Like These
LIONSGATE
If someone witnesses an injustice, what should they do? That question lies at the heart of Small Things Like These. The answers don’t come easy. It’s a despairing and hopeful watch, reminding us that terrible things can happen in the quietest places. What’s more, the perpetrators depend and thrive on that collective silence, making intervention seem impossible.
As a visual concept that’s difficult to tackle, and in this case all of it rests on the shoulders of one man. He isn’t of many words, and oftentimes can’t even look people in the eye. This man, Bill Furlong, is played by Cillian Murphy, a coal merchant who lives in a small town with his wife and daughters. It’s an interesting role to take on following his Oscar-winning performance in Oppenheimer, but there are obvious parallels. Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, Bill is a character who is haunted and wracked with regret, but for entirely different reasons. When he is unexpectedly confronted with abuses happening at a school run by the local Catholic church, he isn’t sure about what to do.
It takes time to realize why Bill is so shaken by what he sees. Not only does he know that what he has witnessed is wrong, but knows where this destructive behavior leads. All of this is depicted subtly and quietly, and his emotional journey is both internal and external. There are flashbacks to his childhood, living with his mother Sarah (Agnes O’Reilly), her employer Mrs. Wilson (Michelle Fairley) and a local farmhand Ned (Mark McKenna). It’s clear he was living an entirely different life that wouldn’t lead to his current circumstances—physically run down from shoveling coal and scraping by to support his family. What went wrong?
Most of this is expressed through Murphy’s performance, pulling the audience into his headspace without a single word. He witnesses things happening in his small town that obviously bother him, but he doesn’t intervene — causing him to both withdraw from his family but make efforts to protect them. However, every time he delivers coal to the local nuns he is pushed closer to a breaking point, realizing it isn’t only a school that is operating there. When he finally tells his wife what he has been seeing and hearing, she tells him, “It’s none of our business.”
After some silence he quietly retorts, “Don’t you ever question it?”
Small Things Like These is a type of film that could easily be overlooked. Its tone might be written off as too bleak, its subject matter too dour and uncomfortable, its pacing too slow and unrewarding. At its worst, it could be interpreted as a portrait of passivity, but there is much more going on with its protagonist. The same could be said for the supporting characters, who bring a natural, lived-in reality to the film’s cloistered world.
It's also worth noting there are some interesting reversals in this film’s casting. Eileen Walsh, who plays Bill’s wife, had a pivotal role in Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters, which is a fitting companion piece to this film. More notably, Emily Watson plays Sister Mary, the headmistress of the school, imbuing her role with the same steely-eyed rigidity of the religious elders who persecuted her in Breaking the Waves.
But most importantly, Small Things Like These addresses what its title suggests, that even the tiniest gestures can have profound consequences on someone’s future. Countering that can be the most intimidating thing the average person might face, and ultimately that is what the film is about: whether to intervene — whatever the cost — or experience the slow death of standing idle and doing nothing.