‘Small Things Like These’ is Anything but Small
For anyone who reads regularly, an announcement of a book adaptation on screen is one with an aftertaste of worry. A film adaptation rarely does its source material justice, let alone is better than the book it’s based on. I had been wanting to read Small Things Like These for a long time before I managed to do so. I had committed myself to a quartet of books which I was racing through so I could read Small Things before its film came out (It didn’t help that my mum was badgering me to book tickets).
Cillian Murphy plays Bill Furlong, father of five and manager of a coal yard, quiet and unassuming, with an air of deference about his person. Small Things Like These is the second of Claire Keegan’s novella to be adapted into a film; The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin), based on Foster, was released in 2022.
I loved the novella. It is written so simply, but with power in every word and it captured the cadence of Irish speech so beautifully. Although it is written in the third person, Keegan lingers on Bill’s thoughts so often that, by the novella’s end, I had so much affection for him. While I enjoyed the film and have been discussing it with praise, I haven’t completely made up my mind about how I think the film compares…
Small Things Like These is set and filmed in New Ross, County Wexford, in south-east Ireland. It’s a small town of family shops and pebbledash cottages, which I have stopped by a couple of times on long drives. The film follows Bill, middle-aged, greying, and haunted by his lonely and troubled childhood, throughout Christmas time in 1987, focusing on his work and life with his family. The plot picks up pace when he has run-ins with the nuns of the Good Shepherd convent, which doubles as Magdalene Laundry for young, unmarried mothers. Bill discovers the women there are treated horribly – their hair cropped, their clothes grey, drab, and uniformed, they were made to wash clothes, scrub floors, and cook, and were locked in coal sheds overnight at the nuns’ will.
What the book and film capture so well is the culture of silence surrounding the Catholic Church’s activities in Ireland at that time. While 56,000 young women were working in Magdalene Laundries between 1922 and 1998, and 85,000 women gave birth in mother and baby homes, the people of Ireland turned a blind eye to this situation. It was only in 2015 when a mass unmarked grave was discovered at the site in Tuam, County Galway that an investigation was launched into the institutions, which found that infant mortality was rife in these mother and baby homes. Between 1939 and 1945, half of infant deaths in Ireland occurred in these facilities. In one home in County Cork, 75% of children died before their first birthday.
After adoption became legal in 1953, children were separated from their mothers. Philomena, a film starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan, reveals that many children were sold for thousands of pounds to wealthy Americans. There was such stigma surrounding childbirth out of wedlock, and unmarried mothers were treated with acute cruelty and unforgiveness in Ireland, which permitted the nuns to run these laundries and homes, funded by the Irish government, with no questioning or backlash. When Bill (Cillian Murphy) mentions what he saw in the convent, his wife Eileen says, “In order to get through this life, there are some things you have to ignore”, even praising the nuns for taking them in, and clothing and feeding them.
“Look after yourself and your business […] if you go making a nuisance of yourself now, you might deprive your daughters of an education.”
– Mrs Keogh, the owner of a pub, warning protagonist Bill
As the Church had “its fingers in every pie”, Irish people were scared to speak up. The Abbess in the film, Sister Mary, subtly threatens Bill, saying “It might be hard to find a place [for your daughters in the school]” and attempts to buy him off.
The film eloquently shows Bill’s turmoil. There were many long, silent shots focused on Bill’s face full of quandary, while the rest of the room were chatting and laughing. The flashbacks to his childhood in a cold manor house where his mother worked were touching. There is nothing that stirs the senses more than seeing a child mourning his mother’s death or crying over terrible Christmas presents. The omnipresence of the Church was a theme so effortlessly represented; the film started with a shot of church bells ringing, and the black shadow of nuns’ habits was present in almost every scene.
However, it was difficult for the director, Tim Mielants, to fit everything which made the book impactful in the film’s 98-minute run time. The film was crucially missing the affection Bill had towards his wife and daughters. Keegan’s narration of the book shows Bill’s deep love for his family, through his worries about his youngest daughter’s spelling and fear of Santa Claus and his long talks with Eileen at night, (who is much brighter and easy-going in the novel), and Keegan’s description of him wanting to stay in bed with her in the morning – “Eileen was fast asleep, and for a while he watched over her, feeling the need of her […] the longing to stay, to reach out and touch her was deep”.
Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh’s on-screen marriage was cold and stale, and Murphy’s Bill seemed like a loved but distant father. Hence, his decision to ignore his wife’s advice and to jeopardise his daughter’s future by taking action at the convent was not as potent as it could have been.
I don’t think the change in the ending of bringing Sarah back to the Furlong house added anything important; I think the book’s ending of Bill walking Sarah through New Ross and leaving the novel there was the perfect ending.
Another omission which may seem insignificant, but that my mum immediately noticed was missing was Bill’s encounter with an old man on the side of the road on the way back from the convent, who, when asked where the road goes, tells Bill, “This road will take you wherever you want to go, son”. While it is clearly the ramblings of an elderly man, it foreshadows perfectly Bill’s straying from the attitudes of Irish society by challenging the cruelty of the nuns and forging his own path in a prescribed world where putting a toe out of line could make you a pariah.
If you would like to find out more about the Irish mother and baby homes then please read;
A shameful chapter of Irish history: mother and baby homes – Humanium
Irish mother and baby homes: Timeline of controversy – BBC News
