PG-13 | 1h 38m | Drama | 2024
As Brad Pitt’s character, Rory Devaney, tells Harrison Ford’s character, Tom O'Meara, in “The Devil’s Own,” “It’s not an American story, it’s an Irish one.”
Morally, it’s a sound tale, but, except for the last 30 seconds, one couldn’t call it an uplifting one. One couldn’t call it enjoyable either. But in the same way that comedic actor Chris Tucker quit Hollywood in order to pursue humanitarian causes after he became the highest-paid movie star ever, Murphy chose to work on a small movie about moral righteousness rather than something big and flashy. One has to raise a glass to that.
‘Small Things Like These’
Bill Furlong (Murphy) is a kindly father of five daughters. He’s a coal merchant living in the Irish town of New Ross in the mid-1980s. He’s fundamentally decent, works hard, and treats others fairly.
An Everyman, Bill delivers bags of coal in his yellow pick-up to various locations in frigid temperatures and then heads home. To establish the mundanity of his life, we witness Bill repeatedly scrubbing his coal-blackened hands clean in the sink before sitting down for dinner with wife Eileen (Eileen Walsh) and his brood of daughters. He seems a good husband and dad, if taciturn to a fault.
But as tongue-tied, ultra-sensitive, stoic, and stiff-upper-lipped as Bill is, the fact that one of the notorious Magdalene Laundries is sitting right there, basically in his back yard, and nobody’s doing anything about it doesn’t sit well with him.
The Magdalene Laundries (also known as Magdalene asylums) were mostly Irish institutions run by mostly Roman Catholic orders, but also by Anglicans and Presbyterians. They operated from the 18th century up until 1996. They ostensibly housed girls aged 14 to 19 who were “in trouble,” as the euphemism for out-of-wedlock pregnancies was known. The girls were sent against their will to “atone for their sins,” doing a convent version of forced prison labor, working hot laundry presses all day, while the convents reaped the profit.
The Mother Superiors of these institutions, as depicted here, are as snake-tongued, all-powerful, and sadistically vindictive as Mafia dons. When Bill ventures inside the convent one day to deliver a coal invoice, he is immediately assailed by two distraught girls who beg him to help them escape.
What’s Bill Gonna Do About it?
When delivering coal on another day, Bill discovers yet another distraught girl, this time locked inside the coal-shed in frigid weather. The convent’s Mother Superior feigns surprise, tut-tuts, gives the girl some hot tea and cake, shoos her off, and then hands Bill an envelope full of cash. Bill doesn’t say thank you. Emily Watson’s character is very reminiscent of Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
How can Bill intervene? He’s just one man, of small existence—perhaps one of the “small things” to which the title obliquely refers. Bill is also deeply damaged; the slightest acts of unkindness that he witnesses on his coal journeys rob him of his power, leaving him unable to breathe. He’s non-confrontational to the point that it’s almost annoying; much rages internally for Bill even if we don’t see it manifested in dramatic ways.
But Bill was also born out of wedlock to a teenager mother (Agnes O’Casey) and was taken in by Mrs. Wilson (Michelle Fairley), a wealthy woman who employed his mother and allowed them to live on her property. Maybe this will give him strength to take action.
“Small Things Like These” is about small acts that carry profound weight even if they remain limited to a small group of characters. It’s a quiet film that examines how good people let bad things happen, and how small things can count when we attempt to push back against evil.
While not a traditionally satisfying film—there’s no high-noon, defiant showdown, or sinister-sister-smackdown—it portrays an individual heeding his conscience, confronting his fears, and ultimately denouncing a conspiracy of silence though right action.
