This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
=★= 𝕬𝖇𝖗𝖆𝖍𝖆𝖒 =★=’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
The Daughters of Murphy were stirring. Every single one.
The littlest one plays Jingle Bells on the accordion.
The others are doing their maths and tracing a map of IRELAND.
The Christmas tree is all decorated. Lights and all.
Mamma is worried sick.
Oh where, oh where is Bill?
In comes Bill, deep in thought forevermore,
Did he just see that farmhouse jigsaw in the shopfront? The one he always wanted when he was a young’un?
He scrubs his dirty hands again and again.
Out damned spot. Out I say.
Ne'er do I want to see my mother again.
The morrow, has come and gone, and in comes Bill at last, and with him Sarah, clothed in God’s comforting hand.
For we’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.
Sorry about that butchered version of a Christmas classic. It just felt right.
I am happy to see more of Claire Keegan’s books getting turned into films. I haven't read this one but I read Foster shortly after seeing An Cailín Ciúin and it's now a favorite film of mine. This one was written in 2021 so it's new.
Apparently not one but two people who worked on Lukas Dhont’s Close were also involved on this project. Alain Dessauvage, the editor, and cinematographer, Frank van den Eeden. But it appears like something was lost in the translation with this one. Small Things Like These takes place in 1980s Ireland, New Ross, in particular, and the protagonist, played by the legendary Cillian Murphy, is a coal worker with a family to feed. He runs the same routine of going to work everyday, having a meal with the other workers before going home and washing his hands before dinner. As the story goes on, he starts to see something wrong taking place in the city with the Catholic nuns, and it triggers his childhood memories. Not a bad premise and I liked the cinematography and the editing with the muted color palette and the way we enter and exit the flashbacks. It is definitely a treat to see Michelle Fairley in one of these films… I started washing my hands vigorously as soon as I left the theater and thinking about Christmas, I’ll tell you that, too. It just takes a little too long to get going and even then I’m still not sure what I obtained from the flashbacks… I don’t know what happened and the tone of silence isn’t as earned as it was with Colm Bairéad's The Quiet Girl. I honestly had no use why Sarah was even there for most of the film. Maybe we needed to be with Sarah more to really drive the point home? I am intrigued, however, by the coincidence that two of the films I have seen this week have been about how society perceives sex work and promiscuity across time and space.
And yet, to fully get a grasp of the context of the Laundries, it required a visit to Wikipedia as the credits were rolling. Not something I think the filmmakers intended, and I am sad because I wanted to understand more through the film. But perhaps the references were very obvious for the niche audience.
Great performance from Cillian though. You really feel the pain and desire to help those around him in his gaze and in his words and in his body language. I'd trust him to take me home (or to his home). The nuns are quite unnerving, especially the one who traipses out into the parking lot and gives Bill a curt dressing down before turning around in a huff. Overall, I liked it and the message of doing the right thing for our fellow human beings is solid. But it just feels extremely clunky. I may just need to study the history of the laundries a bit more and see it a few more times to understand everything it’s saying. I found myself more distracted and not without good reason by how much I loved the kids as they were helping each other with homework and so forth.
