'Small Things Like These': the film

Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see?

In my original review of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These almost exactly three years ago, after its initial publication, this was the question I led with, and which continues for me to be central to what Claire Keegan is saying. As a society, how did we not ‘see’ or, rather, allow ourselves to admit we could see, the darker things in our society? Claire Keegan uses the narrative vehicle of an individual man, the fuel provider Bill Furlong, to open up this idea in our history.

Now the film version arrives, directed by Tim Mielants with a script by Edna Walsh, and Cillian Murphy takes on the central role in a powerful performance. The film follows on from the great success of An Cailín Ciuin/The Quiet Girl, from Keegan’s novella Foster, and the two works share a confidence, a calm stillness and a belief that their stories will grip the audience without recourse to sensation. This was also the case with another recent Irish film that is close to being a masterpiece, Pat Collins’s adaptation of John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun.

I started the week running a webinar for teachers of Small Things Like These, and one night later saw the film, which is now pulling in pleasingly impressive audiences around the country. 1300 teachers have by now attended two runnings of that webinar, an indication of the extent to which the novel has rapidly been adopted in Irish schools in the comparative section of the Leaving Certificate. There were international visitors too: the book is developing a considerable reach, and the film will only increase that. Knowing the text so well makes assessing a cinematic version fraught: film versions of novels need to stand on their own feet, striking a balance between being too deadeningly ‘faithful’ and losing what made the original text special. It is a rare film which can take a novel of quality and reshape it successfully in a radical way (let’s think of Emma and Clueless as one such success). Film has a different language, and somehow the film-makers have to convey everything in the 98 minutes used here in a medium that, live in the cinema at least, allows for no self-pacing and no re-watching. We read novels fundamentally differently. When we admire a book it is largely because we appreciate being intimate with the sensibility of the author: a film version cannot just transfer that sensibility, but must develop its own.

As it happens, this version of Small Things Like These is pretty ‘faithful’ to Claire Keegan’s book, with some minor alterations to the story which I mention below. Its evocation of 1985 New Ross in almost Stgyian pre-Christmas darkness is consistent throughout the film, with minor moments of brighter colour (Les Dawson in the small colour TV). Other images from the novel are carried over: the River Barrow, which Furlong repeatedly crosses, most significantly on foot at the end of the story; the crows (mentioned in my piece on the original Faber cover art); the boy drinking milk from the cat’s bowl outside the priest’s house. And the film goes fully in on Keegan’s most consistent image system, windows-reflections-mirrors: the lorry’s windscreen at the start of the film, stained with rain; Furlong sitting in front of a window at home with a mug of tea, tears running down his cheeks as he thinks of his mother trying to clean his spit-covered school coat (later he puts his own coat over Sarah’s shoulders); the family Christmas preparations seen through a window; Bill as a boy observing through a window at Mrs Wilson’s house his mother and Ned embracing, and, later, kissing (more on that below); the huge frosted panes inside the convent through which we discern the outline of a statue (like the first sight of Furlong from behind, and the shoulders which will later bear the weight of coal bags and eventually the girl Sarah); Eileen looking at her husband through the window fetching their own fuel; a remarkable shot of Furlong standing awkwardly in the convent in a hall of interior windows, like some sort of Escher drawing; most powerfully, Furlong sitting at the barber’s staring at his reflection, Cillian Murphy’s distinctive features wracked by the pressure of his conscience at the very moment he realises he has fetch the girl from the institution.

As mentioned above, the explicitness of what the film does with Ned is one fundamental change from the novel, where Claire Keegan’s approach is more subtle. The relationship with his mother comes to our consciousness much more slowly and delicately in the book, particularly late on when he is told by Mrs Wilson’s relative at the door of the house that Bill looks like Ned (in the film, that Ned must be his uncle). The decision is also taken to introduce the convent early in the film, with Furlong during his first visit seeing a mother pushing a protesting girl into the Good Shepherd Convent. By contrast, Claire Keegan holds her nerve for almost one third of the book, bringing Furlong there only in Section 4 (in my webinars, I used the lens of the great George Saunders from his essential book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: this is the crucial ‘escalation’ in the story - more on that book). The third significant change is right at the end: while Keegan leaves us outside, still climbing the Calvary-like hill towards his house, in the film we accompany the camera right into the claustrophobically tight house, Furlong once again washing his hands in the basin before reaching out to the still-dirty hand of the girl and leading her to meet his family. The film stops before that meeting.

In each case these deviations from Keegan’s story-telling are to make things more obvious, as do minor touches like the Mother Superior telling Furlong that they can always take their business to Ford’s of Wexford. Left out is the tense scene with the young woman from the West when Furlong looks for a kettle to thaw the lock on his yard-gate, which I looked at in my webinar as a highly charged ‘escalation’ in which Furlong imagines another turn his life’s journey could have taken.

The rest of the cast is all top-class, including Eileen Walsh as Furlong’s wife (Eileen!) and Helen Behan as Mrs Kehoe, in a perfectly-performed short scene near the end when she warns Furlong of the consequences of his actions (this is also important in the book). Best of all is Emily Watson as the Mother Superior: she is smarmy, complacent, utterly untrustworthy, dispensing tea to Furlong in a suffocating room in front of hellish flames but really dispensing power: this performance makes you wonder if Furlong’s ‘contrariness’ as he leaves the convent is partly prompted by the way she has manipulated him. (I don’t agree with Derek Scally’s point in the Irish Times about her Englishness allowing Irish audiences a ‘get-out clause’).

There is a level of humiliation in that encounter, made explicit by her writing ‘Eileen’ on the envelope which contains the Christmas card and her bribe to buy Furlong’s silence and complicity. She understands how powerful this will be when Furlong has to talk to his wife, a conversation we witness shortly afterwards after she discovers the envelope at home. But something has stiffened inside Bill. As Claire Keegan writes, when he is about to leave the convent this time, he is

Encouraged by this queer, new power.

Overwhelmingly this is Cillian Murphy’s film. The camera is rarely off him, often coming uncomfortably close to his intense features, even when lying on his side in bed. This is a different kind of acting to his Oscar-winning role in Oppenheimer, which he filmed just before this one, and it requires the highest level of skill in micro-expression, especially since he says fairly little during the 98 minutes (and many times he does not respond to others’ prompts or complete his own statements). It is a performance which consistently conveys just what is inside this man, the many-headed conflicts, past traumas and broken nature which make him unable to relax, a man who cannot fall asleep after a pint on a Sunday afternoon, and who eventually cannot do anything other than he does.

As Furlong walks Sarah back to his home,

He found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another. Was it possible to carry on for all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian and face yourself in the mirror?

The film, like the book on which it is based, forces us to answer that question, and to face ourselves in the mirror as we face the screen.