‘Small Things Like These’: A Troubled Conscience
A review of ‘Small Things Like These’; Lionsgate, 2024.
The small-Irish-town, corrupt-Catholic-church story has been done to death, I know; but Cillian Murphy rarely makes a bad film, and Emily Watson is no slouch, either. Thus I reasoned myself into ambling over to Chiswick Cinema after mass to go and see Small Things Like These, based on the Orwell Prize-winning book by Claire Keegan, a film which was sure to tell me why my going to mass was evil.
The year is 1985. Bill Furlong (Murphy) sells coal in New Ross, a town in southwest County Wexford, Ireland. He has five children, all girls, and seems like a thoroughly decent, hard-working sort of guy. Bill is the sort of man who stops his van to chat to a poor boy collecting sticks for winter fuel and, despite not raking it in himself, gives him a few pennies. But he is also troubled. He finds it difficult to sleep. In flashbacks, we learn that Bill was raised by a single mother employed as a maid by a rich female landowner. With Christmas approaching, Bill remembers wanting a jigsaw as a child and getting a hot water bottle instead.
Bill is the sort of man who stops his van to chat to a poor boy collecting sticks for winter fuel.
One night, unable to sleep, Bill sets off on his coal deliveries earlier than usual. At the local convent, a regular customer, he opens the coal shed to find a pregnant teenage girl shivering in the corner. She has been locked in there. Bill, visibly troubled by this, takes the girl, Sarah, back to the main building where the nuns cajole her into saying she was locked in the shed by the other girls while playing hide and seek. The rather terrifying Mother Superior, Sister Mary (Watson) then invites Bill in for a chat about his family. It is made clear to Bill that if he tells anyone what he has just seen, then his remaining daughters will be barred from attending the local Church-run school.
Much inner turmoil ensues. Murphy should be congratulated for conveying so much while saying so little. Bill has duties to his wife and children. He has obligations to his business and staff. He also has religious commitments. And then there is his conscience, shaped by his experience as the only child of a poor single mother. These various moral concerns do not sit easily with one another, and though we, as viewers, know what Bill ought to do, we could not blame him if he took another course of action, such is the complexity of his situation. What makes matters worse is that he cannot talk about what he is going through. Those who perceive that something has taken place unhelpfully offer advice.
Though we, as viewers, know what Bill ought to do, we could not blame him if he took another course of action.
This is a story about conscience. Adam Smith, author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments as well as The Wealth of Nations, spoke of the ‘impartial spectator’, an internal judge that monitors our thoughts and actions. Socrates described a daimonion (or ‘daemon’), an inner voice or spiritual presence within him that warned him against certain actions though never directed him toward any specific path. More saliently in the presence case, John Henry Newman, a great literary figure as well as a Catholic saint, argued that conscience was the ‘voice of God’ within us, and that going against it was a kind of blasphemy. The guilt and remorse we feel when we violate our conscience is so painful because we have transgressed against something greater than ourselves. For Newman, a well-formed conscience will generally align with Church teachings because the Church, on his view, spoke with an authority given by God. But he acknowledged that in some cases, when conscience went against the teachings of the Church, conscience was supreme.
One wishes that more Catholics read Newman, reader; and certainly that more of those who allowed the outrage of the Magdalene Laundries to take place had read him. I cannot bring myself to believe that all of those who enabled and perpetuated and covered up the imprisonment of so-called fallen women in asylums in Ireland thought that was right. Over 200 years, around 30,000 girls — girls, that is, not women — were thrown in these laundries for the supposedly high crimes of sex work, being seduced, or being victims of rape or incest. Some were there not because of anything remotely sexual but because they were orphans, abused or had been deserted by their families.
Socrates described a daimonion (or ‘daemon’), an inner voice or spiritual presence within him that warned him against certain actions.
But I digress. The cinematography of Small Things Like These is suitably dark and brooding, with the Christmas lights, which proliferate as the stories unfold, at once evoking family, childhood, innocence and the looming, menacing presence of the Church. And yet those little lights, those ‘small things’, equally bring to mind that ‘still small voice’ that the prophet Elijah hears in the First Book of Kings, or the angel on one’s shoulder, or the nagging voice of conscience, or the presence of hope at the bottom of Pandora’s box (jar, really; we have Erasmus to blame for the mistranslation). I barely need to add that Cillian Murphy acts fantastically well; Watson, in her turn as a dead-eyed Catholic matriarch, is also very good. I would single out the performance of Eileen Walsh, who plays Bill’s wife, and wonderfully blends the practical and compassionate demeanour that, in theory at least, we call ‘maternal’.
Reflecting on the film, it strikes me that the whole thing is a sort of subversion or at least an invocation of Dickens, made plain by Bill’s request for a copy of Hard Times for Christmas (‘I never got round to reading that one,’ he says). It is a good deal more bleak than anything Dickens managed: in fact, the mood is unrelentingly pessimistic. Here we come upon the central problem of the film: its lack of much variation. As Salman Rushdie puts it, in stories, ‘things happen’; in Small Things Like These, not enough does. Indeed there are long stretches during which only Murphy’s heroic acting keeps us interested. When something finally does happen, the film ends—very suddenly and ambiguously. And so for all its merits, and it does have merits, I am afraid that I left unsatisfied.
