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‘Small Things Like These’ Review: Cillian Murphy Brings Quiet Intensity to a Mournful Irish Moral Drama
A father (Cillain Murphy) challenges the community code of silence around the Magdalene Laundries in Tim Mielants' powerful 'Small Things Like These.'
Deftly adapted by playwright Enda Walsh from Claire Keegan’s Booker-shortlisted novella, “Small Things Like These” counts on its audience to know what’s happening behind those doors — a litany of abuses visited upon the “fallen” women and children confined in Ireland’s corrupt, Catholic-run Magdalene laundries. Set in the days leading up to Christmas, “Small Things Like These” makes a virtue of the midwinter’s stingy daylight — which, in this stretch of southwest Ireland, is dull even at its noontime brightest — and of darkness warmed by seasonal, face-saving lights and garlands. But it’s Murphy’s exquisitely pained performance, unclenching by fine degrees into something like grace, that gives “Small Things Like These” its eventual, fist-in-the-gut power, even as the film evades melodramatic confrontation to the last, ending elegantly at a point where many other stories might choose to begin.
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