So this year’s Oscar ceremony is almost here. Meanwhile I want to write about a movie totally absent from the list of nominees, though its star—who’s also one of its producers—won last year’s Best Actor Oscar for playing the title role in Oppenheimer. Cillian Murphy, born and raised in Ireland, had fallen in love with Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, a tiny but powerful 2021 Irish novella known as the shortest work to ever become a finalist for the prestigious Booker Prize. It was he who assembled a production team that includes Matt Damon.
The resulting film, now on Prime, is acutely sensitive to Keegan’s themes as well as her taut use of language. It’s a small story, as befits a book barely100 pages long. But its concerns are large, because it takes on the horrors of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, in which—until as recently as 1996—Catholic nuns welcomed unwed mothers into their convents, only to exploit their labor and steal their babies. (Contraception was then illegal in Ireland, and the power of the Church was such that no one spoke out for decades about the abuses occurring in their towns.)
The horrors of the system have been covered in other dramatic films and documentaries. Part of what makes Keegan’s work, and the film it inspired, unique is that the focus is on a man—a middle-aged dealer in gas and coal, circa 1985—whose working-class life is upended when he comes in contact with a victim of the nuns’ double-edged hospitality. Bill Furlong (played, of course by Murphy) has made a comfortable if not a posh, living for himself and his family, which includes a hard-working wife and five school-age daughters. His girls, all of them promising and well-loved, attend St. Margaret’s, “the only good school for girls” in the vicinity, and so it’s vital that he remain on excellent terms with the Mother Superior (a frosty Emily Watson) of the convent next door. All the locals have a sense of what’s going on behind the convent walls, but (as Bill’s wife Eileen tartly reminds him), “If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore.”
But Bill, a man prone to introspection, sees in the plight of pregnant young women’s the situation of his own mother. Pregnant with Bill at 16, she was graciously accepted by the local wealthy Protestant widow as domestic help, rather than being treated as a “fallen woman” and sent to labor for the nuns. And though his mother suddenly died young, the kindly and childless Mrs. Wilson raised Bill in comfortable surroundings, then helped him to find education, a wife, and a business of his own. Now he relishes his role as pater familias, but there comes a time when he finds himself forced to make a difficult but thrilling choice.
The story takes place at Christmastime, and the cold, damp weather seeps into the film. This makes it all the more stunning when the Mother Superior invites Bill into her cozy study with its blazing fire. The imagery of the novel—its use of crows, for instance, as an ominous symbol of the nuns’ power—is faithfully preserved on screen, and of course the soundtrack is filled with Christmas carols that ironically remind us of comfort and joy. I’m only sorry that the mystery of Bill’s paternity, sustained throughout the novel, is pretty well answered in the film version, in a way that invites its own questions.
Not everyone will like this film, but its harsh beauty shines bright in the winterly darkness.
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