Faithful with Small Things Like These

The unexpected consolation of the anti-Christmas Carol

Based on the award-winning book by Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These is a subtle, haunting movie about society’s complicity in evil and the great courage it takes to do the right thing. 

Bill Furlong (played by Cillian Murphy, in his first role since winning the Oscar for his portrayal of J. Robert Oppenheimer), is a doting father and battered coal merchant in the small town of New Ross, Ireland. Compared to other families in town, the Furlongs do well enough; they can afford to send their two eldest daughters to the local Catholic school, St. Margaret’s—”the only good school for girls in the town,” Keegan writes in the novella. But despite his long hours of backbreaking work, Furlong barely scrapes by. His wife Eileen (played by Eileen Walsh) worries about the expense of Christmas and reminds him that they’ll need new windows in the new year.

Furlong tries to “keep his head down and stay on the right side of people,” but on a routine delivery to the Good Shepherd Convent days before Christmas, he can’t help but notice a young woman being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the institution. Slipping in to deliver the invoice, he sees women working in a laundry room and scrubbing the floor. One of them frantically begs him to help her escape to the river. Promptly and firmly escorted out by the nuns, Furlong tries to shake off what he just saw, only to discover a young, pregnant woman locked in the coal shed on his next visit. From the corner of the dark cellar, she says her name is Sarah Redmond.

After he walks her into the convent, Sr. Mary (played by Emily Watson) makes him an offer he can’t refuse: an invitation to tea in her darkly lit office. From a stack of paper bills on her desk, Sr. Mary methodically places a handsome sum of money into a Christmas card—a bribe for his discreetness. As Alyssa Wilkinson observes, the movie “plays just a little like a gangster film.”

The institution, we quickly realize, is one of the now infamous Magdalene Laundries of Ireland, in which orders of Roman Catholic nuns housed unwed mothers and forced them to do the grueling (and unpaid) work of washing stains out of dirty linen, all under the guise of reforming their low character. As the camera follows Furlong around the halls of the convent, he hears behind closed doors the agonizing screams of young mothers and the yelps of their babies. The film is dedicated to more than 56,000 women sent to Magdalene Laundries from 1922 to 1998.

And yet, rather than focus on the plight of these young women and their infants, the movie asks why a town (or an entire country) might turn a blind eye to such cruelty.

The answer is, in the words of Dallas Willard, “the simple readiness of ‘decent’ individuals to harm others or allow harm to come to others when the conditions are ‘right.’” Eileen warns Bill that “if you want to get on in this life, there are things you have to ignore.” “‘Tis no business of mine,” says a friend, “but surely you must know these nuns have a finger in every pie . . . You know there’s nothing, only a wall separating that place from St. Margaret’s.” 

What kind of psychic preparation, then, is required to do the right thing in moments of crisis?

Thinking of the young woman trapped in the coal shed, Bill can’t help but remember his own mother, another “fallen woman” who, but for the grace of a rich widow named Mrs. Wilson, might also have ended up in a Magdalene Laundry. Borrowing a degree of respectability from the generosity of her benefactress, Bill’s mother was comfortably employed as a live-in maid—alongside a farmhand who, unbeknownst to Bill at the time, may have been his father. 

Bill Furlong may have been one of “the lucky ones,” but he was still teased as a kid. In a flashback, we see his crying mother scrub the bullies’ spit out of her son’s peacoat. Years later Furlong scrubs the coal from his hands each time he comes home after work, trying, violently at times, to cleanse himself from the shame of his inheritance and the pain of his childhood. Neither he nor his mother can totally escape the shadow of the Magdalene Laundries.

But Furlong is faithful in the small things: He pays his employees well. Much to the chagrin of his wife, he gives his pocket change to a starving boy on the side of the road. He is particularly attuned to the hardships of young women. Unable to sleep, he watches drunk men, stumbling home from the pub, foist themselves on their dates. And in one scene, he asks his eldest daughter if any of his workers have given her any trouble.

A film about a man delivering coal on Christmas Eve, Small Things Like These is a Christmas movie— “a sort of anti–Christmas Carol,” as one reviewer put it. In one of the movie’s many flashbacks, we see Furlong as a boy, reading Dickens’s novella aloud to the applause of his benefactress. 

In Dickens’s classic story, after receiving visits from three spirits, Ebenezer Scrooge rises on Christmas morning resolving to “live in the Past, the Present, and the Future” and generously buys “the prize turkey” for his employee, Bob Cratchit, and his struggling family. Similarly, the Mother Superior’s gift to the Furlongs will “more than pay what’s owing at the butcher’s,” as Eileen exclaims in the book; she’ll pick up the Christmas turkey and ham in the morning. But while Scrooge’s liberality makes possible his own reconciliation with his Christianly neighbors, Sr. Sarah’s “generosity” blackmails Furlong into remaining silent rather than facing ostracism from his community.

Dickens’s tale is about a dramatic conversion. In Small Things Like These, Bill Furlong’s courage is the result of years of suffering and the steady accumulation of small deeds of charity. No miserly scrooge is beyond redemption, but perhaps most often, great acts of courage are the result of the habitual practice of virtue rather than spontaneous heroism. As C. S. Lewis remarked in Mere Christianity, “Good and evil both increase at compound interest.”

Of course, a simple act of courage won’t undo decades of injustice. But if the harvest is plentiful and the workers are few, Furlong, as his name suggests, has the chance to do good with the acreage he has. (A “furlong” is the length of a furrow, or the long side of an acre.) In Keegan’s novella, he reflects on Mrs. Wilson, “of the small things she had said and done and had refused to do and say and what she must have known, the things which, when added up, amounted to a life.” 

True religion, the Apostle James writes, is “to look after orphans and widows” and “to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” 

True religion, you might say, is caring for small things like these.

Joseph K. Griffith II is the William Blackstone Professor of Law & Society at the Ashbrook Center and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Ashland University.

_{Image: Liongate Movies}