DAN WEBSTER:
By now, the story of the Magdalene Laundries should be somewhat familiar. Not that it made headlines on this side of the ocean, but it did rock the world of Catholicism in Ireland.
The facts are these: for two centuries or more, young Irish women—many, but not all, unmarried and in the euphemistic “family way”—were consigned to convents run by the Church of Ireland. One in Dublin was even known as the Magdalen Asylum for Penitent Females, a term applied not just to so-called “seduced” women but also to many who were orphaned and destitute or who, for a variety of reasons, had run afoul of the legal system.
Operated primarily by nuns, but reportedly with covert backing by some members of the Irish government, the laundries forced young women to work long hours under harsh circumstances—a situation that wasn’t made public until the 1990s and early 21st century.
Using the story of the laundries, which were the subject of Peter Mullan’s 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters, Irish writer Claire Keegan wrote the 2021 novella Small Things Like These. And it is that work that filmmaker Tim Mielants adapted for his film of the same name.
Mielants’ film stars Cillian Murphy as Bill Furlong, a man who runs a coal-delivery service in the southwestern Irish town of New Ross. The father of five young women, and married to Eileen (played by Eileen Walsh), Bill is a conscientious man, hard-working and attentive to his family.
When we are introduced to him, though, it is closing in on Christmas, 1985. And for reasons that aren’t at first clear, Bill is troubled. He’s having flashbacks to his childhood, which we come to find out involved his living with one of New Ross’ more affluent citizens—a woman who had taken in both Bill and his unmarried mother. The woman’s charity, it seems, was what allowed Bill’s mother to avoid having to end up in the local laundry. Even so, a sense of emotional darkness still haunts him, long after his mother’s death.
And that sense gets compounded when Bill starts to suspect that something isn’t right with how the local convent is treating its young female workers.
Bill’s company services the convent, which is run by a no-nonsense mother superior (played by Emily Watson). Unable to sleep one morning, he begins his deliveries early. And in the process of lugging bags of coal into the convent’s shed, he discovers a young girl, Sarah (played by Zara Devlin), shivering in the cold, having been locked in the unheated shed overnight.
When Bill takes the girl inside, he is greeted coldly before being taken to see the mother superior. She, exerting her authority—albeit in a studied, controlled, yet confident manner—has Bill served tea while she quizzes him about his own family. And she points out, slyly, that the education of his own daughters depends on the school that the convent runs.
If that isn’t enough of a threat, the envelope full of cash that she hands him—and the mention that there are other coal businesses in the area—certainly is. And Bill takes the hint, though where the movie is going next is clear: Bill must decide whether to do what he thinks is the right thing or stay quiet for the sake of his family’s future.
Director Mielants reveals all this in a slow, staid manner. The Irish winter is mostly dark and chilly, emphasizing the contrast between the outdoors—and, in fact, the convent itself—and the warm interior of the Furlong home. And Murphy, a Best Actor Oscar winner for last year’s Oppenheimer, is suitably somber as Bill, even if Mielants does add in one, or maybe two, too many scenes of—another symbolism alert—his washing his hands.
What we’re left with is a commentary about community, one that involves not just individual responsibility but how society as a whole—especially when influenced by larger cultural forces—can be compelled to accept something so clearly wrong as being perfectly natural.
All of which gives a greater sense of irony to the title that Keegan originally penned: Small Things Like These, that aren’t nearly so small after all.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com.
