Review: Small Things Like These
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It's early days, but the Berlinale has already honored three solid films with vastly different backgrounds. I usually pair films from similar genres in these reports, and in this case I think the pairing of these works represents the diversity of this year's festival.
Small Things Like These is an intimate, deep character study set in Ireland that focuses on what matters: Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) is a local coal merchant with his wife and five daughters. A few days before Christmas in 1985, while he was delivering coal to the convent, he came across a horrifying sight: a young woman being dragged, screaming and kicking, into the church by her mother and several nuns. The film, based on the novel of the same name by Claire Keegan, doesn't say so explicitly, but it doesn't take long to guess that she is an unwed mother, given the politics of the time and the country's Catholic customs. The image haunts Bill, forcing him to confront difficult memories of his own childhood and the religious foundations of this close-knit community.
Tim Meelants' film is haunting and contemplative, its solemn rhythm defining its first hour. Through effortless cuts, we flash back to a young Bill living with his single mother on his employer's farm, then to his present as a slumped-shouldered manual laborer. Director and cinematographer Frank van den Eeden's opaque compositions (we see Bill from afar, trapped in a door frame, through a steamy car window) tell us a lot about him: his silence, his loneliness, and his peculiar sense of morality. Everyone knows about the crimes in the convent, but no one dares to rebel against the powerful sisters. When Bill tells his wife (Eileen Walsh) about it, she begs him to stop it. But Bill can't help it, especially when he encounters Sarah, one of the unwed mothers freezing in a coal shed just outside the church.
It's a promising premise, but the film loses momentum in the final 30 minutes. The film could have easily been 10 minutes longer. Because, unlike "God's Creatures," a contemporary Irish story that similarly deals with church misogyny, the sisters here, especially Mother Sister (Emily Watson), are little more than one-dimensional, sinister characters. Nevertheless, the urban dynamics, told in sharp visual language, provide sharp context and necessary depth. Murphy's presence helps, too. Here he is a George Bailey-like figure whose generosity holds the threads of this web together. Murphy knows that the smallest of decisions can change a situation. Every deep breath he takes forms the basis of the film. Murphy plays the final notes with childlike wonder, sending shivers of tenderness through the audience as they watch the flawless "Small Things Like These." The film is available on the Flixtor films website.
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