All About That Face: Small Things Like These
In Tim Mielants’s and Enda Walsh’s movie, Cillian Murphy’s expression is everything. Playing a very ordinary coal merchant, very Boys From the Black Stuff-like, Bill Furlong, we see him shouldering bags of coal into sheds, and planning Christmas. He’s also starting to remember, his memories whooshing out like a painful flood at inconvenient times. In the manner of Oranges and Sunshine, this is a slow-burning reveal with nuanced performances rather than obvious heroes and villains.
It’s hard to tell where we are (maybe late 1970's/early 1980’s?) Nonetheless, in the small Irish town of New Ross, nuns still rule. They control access to resources, cash and education, particularly female education, and reputation. Even employment opportunities. A respecter of women, Bill sees a woman dragging a screaming, resisting younger woman off the street and into a car as he goes about his deliveries. As the father of confident, feisty clever girls, he quietly begins to reflect on what the nun regime and the whole cultural-social system of the town are doing to girls and women. Though there’s an unspoken thought system (discussed by him and his wife at one point) that the young women deserve what they’re getting. They should be grateful — they get food, a trade, a roof over their heads, are off the streets. But at what cost? They vanish into the isolated Gothicky home and that’s that.
Using grainy visuals as we jump back and forth between past and present, Bill begins to notice more and more things which aren’t right, which are off, which everyone accepts as just how things are and looks away from. He sees a scared looking young boy wandering the countryside with a bag full of large sticks. Everyone knows that the boy’s father is an alcoholic drinking away the family’s resources — food money and all. On his early morning rounds he sees a young boy running barefoot across the back streets and desperately drinking water from what looks like a dog’s bowl. Everyone knows, but no-one acts.
It’s when he finds a girl hidden in the convent coal shed that Bill can’t help himself but begin to ask deeper questions. He’s encountered the same girl before, who begged him to help her escape. She and another young girl are on their knees scrubbing floors. These young girls are pregnant outside of marriage and put away from ‘decent’ society.
Everything is hidden, concealed. Wandering round to find the Mother Superior to pay a bill or resolve an issue over an order, Bill sees what no-one wants him to see — young pregnant girls sweating over heavy manual labour — in the kitchen, in the laundry, being marshalled for a role call in the same meagre uniforms.
Through his memories, we realise that Bill also knows about a culture of social stigma and shame. He was the son of a young unmarried mother, who seems to have been taken in by a rich cultured widow and landowner, who can afford to sit above the existing system of the town. Protected working for her, his mother gets some peace and dignity again. Bill also has a friend and surrogate older brother/father-figure in Ned (Mark McKenna).
Though there’s a heart rending moment as he longs for a jigsaw and gets a hot water bottle on Christmas day. There’s a relationship going on in the background between his mother and Ned— is he Bill’s real father? We don’t know — and record keeping for unmarried mother seems deliberately poor and about subterfuge. Bill’s mother dies shockingly, suddenly and he’s taken under the protection of the rich widow fully rather than being a bit of Miss Havisham style in-house entertainment for her. It’s hard to work out who Ned (Mark McKenna) is (he’s described as a farmhand); although here he looks more like the widow’s son, very country squire and seems to end up owning the widow’s former home. Partly this is because we never see him working doing farmhand things, he seems to idle around the house and the grounds, being compassionate to Bill and affectionate to his mother.
Everyone, however, has their secrets — Bill’s being bullied at school, his mother seen weeping as she cleans the spit from his coat — and he won’t say or tell what’s really happening to him. We know (from Bill’s memories) that Ned cared for him, but we don’t know what the relationship really was. Bill increasingly wants truth and answers — which he never gets to the bottom of. Equally painful is when his loving wife Eileen (Eileen Walsh) flippantly mentions his past, his shame, and wounds him to the core.
Somehow he survives all the horror to work in the town, run his own business and have a loving marriage and thriving lively family. Yet he’s causing his wife concern as he gets quieter and quieter, stops sleeping and suddenly requests a Charles Dickens book for Christmas. Bill, knowing his own experiences growing up and what he’s seen, grows increasingly concerned for his girls and fiercely protective of them. Though he should have no fears, he’s raised strong girls who speak out and back and won’t be cowed or shamed. (Unlike the young women hidden behind the ‘protection’ of the nuns).
Emily Watson plays a politely terrifying Mother Superior, Sister Mary — never has the offer of a cup of a tea and a slice of cake been more chillingly terrifying. She suddenly gives Bill a Christmas card stuffed with cash for his wife — a bribe or hush money? Or another threat as they discuss his daughters’ future schooling plans?
Bill’s conscience really seems to stir at the Christmas service, again led by the scarily ungracious Sister Mary preaching about God’s compassion and kindness. As Bill speaks the responses along with the rest of the congregation the irony, the wrongness of what’s being done (in Jesus’s name) jarringly contrasts to how God is being proclaimed by them. It must all must be clanging away in his head. (Curiously, there doesn’t seem to be a Priest, the whole place is managed by nuns, who even run the church services).
Buying his loved wife the patent shoes she desires, he can’t keep away from the home. We see it in his walk, how he can’t stop moving forward with purpose. Feeling compelled to sort out the nun’s delivery issues, even at Christmas, he once again goes to the coal shed — where he finds what he most dreads.
Like Anora, this is a movie about good, decent guys being good, decent guys. So much of the movie focuses on hands — working hands, busy hands, but also hands reaching out to help, to rescue, to restore. Hands which are trustworthy and kind. Never has a more beautiful sentence being uttered than when Bill reassures the terrified girl locked in the shed (again), that he means ‘no harm, he’s there to help’. They walk/shuffle back to his home and the colour saturates, the light blasts away, everything becomes smother and glossier. Bill’s tender solidarity is on display in public now, he can no longer look away or stay silent — they walk together openly hand in hand. Overwhelmed, Sarah (Zara Devlin) follows Bill into his family home, the normality of everything clearly hitting her. (Perhaps wondering too what will happen to her, what’s next?) And the next is Bill’s smiling face and offered hand inviting the girl tenderly, trustingly into his family and safety.
Based on Clare Keegan’s book, this is such a movie about how we care for others (or don’t) and how much we need good guys in our society — loving fathers, husbands and friends. It leaves us worrying as the kitchen bustle, chatter and TV are suddenly silenced. We worry for Sarah, we worry for Bill and Eileen and their girls — what it means for his family and marriage. At the same time, he’s doing the costly right thing.
Stay for the credits at the end and eye pop as you realise Matt Damon and Cillian Murphy are producers; Ben Affleck an executive producer!
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