The image of coal merchant Bill Furlong (played by Cillian Murphy) ploughing his shovel into a wall of coal, a further bank of the black nuggets rising like damnation behind him, stays with me.
Furlong is a film-everyman, in the tradition of Atticus Finch, as played by Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird. Furlong is not driven by a legal search for salvation, but by a rooted urge for solidarity, mined from his own life, the loss of his mother and his fears for his family. Ultimately he is driven to do the right thing, despite advice that if he wants to get on in this life he has to ignore certain things.
‘Small’ is in the title and it is a small story, set in a small town in the south-east of a small country. Ireland, at Christmas in the 1980s, seems like Ireland in the 1950s, because much of Ireland changed very little in those thirty years. The phenomenal, often unnerving, social and physical changes in Ireland since then fail to mask the grimness of those years, as the victims of the power of church and state call for redress.
The ‘power of church and state’ is present in the nuns who run the secondary school, beside the laundry, where incarcerated young women and local people launder the dirty linen of the clergy, the hospitals, the local elite and the public, in an industry so craven that its stains will never be cleansed, but will sully Ireland for years.
I almost fall over, as I exit the cinema. I lean against a wall. I’m not helped by being on crutches, due to a disability. My wife checks with me, knowing I am liable to medical collapse. I reassure her I am moved, not ill. She has seen both manifestations before. I didn’t speak for almost 12 hours after seeing Tom Murphy’s play Conversations on a Homecoming.
I am stunned.
It is the art that stuns me. The art of the writers. The art of the actors. The art of the film-makers. Art making imagination manifest. There is good factual work on the mother and baby homes, notably Margo Harkin’s film documentary Stolen. I favour fiction over fact. Imaginings that stun, move and silence me. I write, in Journeywork, a creative life,
Facts are disputed. Fictions are enjoyed, relished and savoured. Truth is brought to bear.
Fictional images move me to tears.
Caitriona Cunningham’s play The Marian Hotel fictionalises her lived-experience in a mother and baby home. When a pregnant child, carrying a doll, joins the young women joshing and joking on stage, the characters and the audience are stunned to silence. All jocularity is stilled. Tragedy is vehemently presented and can’t be denied.
Art is achieved. Deep truths, beyond facts, are accessed.
In Small Things like These, Bill Furlong makes soda-bread toast on a griddle pan and passes slices to his daughters, seated at the table, doing home-work. He urges them to eat up. His primary care, alongside his wife, is for his family. And then, in the ordinary course of his work, a young woman, incarcerated in the laundry, appeals directly for his help.
The image of Furlong dishing out the toast and speaking quietly to his daughters sits alongside images of his restlessness at night. He rises early and walks to his coal yard through the dark streets of New Ross, evoking memories of the dark streets in Waterford where I grew up, where my mother, my aunt and their neighbours worked in a Magdalene Laundry, alongside abandoned women chained to the drudge of machines, steam, heat and hard labour under the stern admonishments of nuns and priests, who delivered power over them as a matter of grace.
The dis-grace of that historical institution stinks. The collusion with the State reeks. The actions of the men who impregnated and abandoned many of the women are criminal.
Images of my mother and the women she worked with are in the film. Seen at the sink, the back of Eileen Furlong (Eileen Walsh) is an image of my mother. The fiction wrenches my heart crossways.
How any young woman or man, called to service in the name of their God, can commit to an authoritarian, patriarchal institution, in the face of that history, shocks me. Are there no other vehicles for their service?
Ireland is fortunate in having writers like Clare Keegan and Enda Walsh, alongside actors like Eileen Walsh and Cillian Murphy, making films such as Small Things like These. Performances are excellent throughout. Murphy carries the film on his stooped shoulders, a ten hundredweight (cwt) bag of slack to bank the fire raging inside Furlong. The darkness is gripping and vivid. A sense of people doing their best runs through the film.
Go see it. Be moved to grief and anger. And admiration, as I was.
A small thing, part of a big picture, as imagined by Richard Rorty.
… human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognised by clearing away ‘prejudice’ or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see suffering people as fellow sufferers.
Recommended.
Small Things like These, film drama, Artists Equity/Big Things Films, Ireland, 2024
To Kill a Mockingbird, film drama, Universal, USA, 1962
Stolen, film doc, Besom Productions, Ireland, 2023
The Marian Hotel, stage-play, Caitriona Cunningham, Sole Purpose Productions, Derry, 2024
Conversations on a Homecoming, stage-play, Tom Murphy, Druid, Galway, 1985
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, book, Richard Rorty, Cambridge, 1989
Journeywork, a creative life, book, Dave Duggan, Nerve Centre, Derry, 2024
A blog post on the novella Small Things like These by Claire Keegan
https://breathingwithalimp.blogspot.com/2023/05/reading-small-things-like-these-by.html
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