Berlinale Competition | “Small Things Like These” – The Oscar candidate’s fixed, anxious look
Fri 02/16/24 | 06:59 am | By By Fabian Wallmeier
© Shane O’Connor
Audio: rbb24 Culture | 02/16/2024 | Jacob Bauer | Image: © Shane O’Connor 02/16/24 | 6:59 a.m
The Berlinale 2024 opened on Thursday evening with a decidedly dreary film. “Small Things Like These” with “Oppenheimer” star Cillian Murphy is boring historical cinema with a questionable perspective. By Fabian Wallmeier
It’s clear from the first second who’s in charge here: “Small Things Like These”, the opening film of the Berlinale, begins with the ringing of bells. We can’t see anything yet, we just hear the bells and then see the sun rise over the hilly Irish town. Or let’s say: how it gets a little brighter. Because it never gets really sunny here. It is and remains hazy, rainy, desolate.
The church not only rings in the day here, it also has the small town under control in other ways, in the form of a monastery and its icy superior. The most talented children are sent to the monastery school and no important decision in the town is made without the nuns. Anyone who cautiously expresses criticism will quickly be thwarted by others.
The nuns run a so-called Magdalen laundry here. A system that really existed: For decades, especially in Ireland, young expectant mothers of illegitimate children were exploited with forced labor in laundries. Their children were taken away from them.
What goes on behind the monastery walls?
“Small Things Like These” based on the short novel by Claire Keegan, tells a fictional small part of this story, around Christmas 1985 – and from the perspective of a man. Oscar nominee Cillian Murphy (“Oppenheimer”) plays Bill Furlong, a hard-working coal dealer and father of five daughters. One day he observes how young Sarah is delivered screaming and against her will by her parents to the monastery next door. Bill begins to question what is going on behind the monastery walls and how he can help Sarah – and at the same time is confronted with his own childhood and his mother’s story.
Director Tim Mielants relies heavily on his leading actor and his trademark facial expression: Cillian Murphy stares into nothingness with a fixed, anxious look, his mouth slightly open. Every now and then a tear rolls down the otherwise unchanged face. Yes, we get it: This man ponders his demons from morning to night. And what could be more important or interesting to say about the exploitation of women than the dark ruminations of a man? A questionable perspective.
Consequential, but a shame
As one-dimensional, if somehow lovable, the main character Bill remains, the female supporting characters are of course even more so. We learn next to nothing about Sarah’s ordeal. The story of Furlong’s mother, who died young and was also named Sarah, is only partially told in the flashbacks to Billy’s childhood. This is logical if, true to the original novel, one chooses Bill’s perspective as the only one. But it’s also a shame, especially since the film from Bill’s perspective never develops a narrative pull like the book reportedly does.
Bill’s opponent is Mother Superior, endowed with unmistakable icy coldness by Emiy Watson. With a superior smile and an unyielding gaze, she puts the appearance of Christian goodness ahead of her obvious lust for power. Your decisions are irrevocable because the will of God speaks through them. She, too, is a figure who remains trapped in boring one-dimensionality.
Garishly oversaturated early short films
If you look at Tim Mielant’s first attempts as a director, it has little to do with “Small Things Like These”. “The Sunflyers”, set on a hot summer day in his native Flanders, and the desert story “Duffel” are bursting with garishly oversaturated colors and equally garish satirical exuberance. The international so-called quality television has obviously driven him out of both: he earned his money primarily as a director of dark series such as “The Responder” and “Peaky Blinders” (also with Cillian Murphy).
With “Small Things Like These” he takes the hazy, gloomy look to the extreme. There is only a hint of homeliness in the Furlongs’ modest home – but only after Bill has scrubbed his coal-black hands clean and raw. The rest is dreary: poverty, fog, coal dust, aimless, wordless pub conversations, dull shades of brown, rainy window panes. Even when it finally snows for Christmas, everything remains a muddy, grayish color.
Even the dimly lit monastery corridors radiate a timelessly hideous inhospitality. Speaking of timeless: If “Come on Eileen” by Dexys Midnight Runners wasn’t playing in the pub at the beginning of the film, the film could be set in 1975, 1965 or 1955 just as it was in 1985. Misery, poverty and sadness are timeless, or so we might be told.
Why this opening film?
The question remains: Why do Carlo Chatrian and Mariette Rissenbeek open their last Berlinale with such a dreary film based on formula? Just so that presumably future Oscar contender Murphy and co-producer Matt Damon can bring a bit of Hollywood to Berlin? Isn’t Matt Damon there all the time anyway?
One can only hope that the decision in favor of “Small Things Like These” is not due to the fact that the competition does not have more exciting, bolder, more artistically ambitious, more emotionally stirring films to offer than this one. Well, let the games begin!
Contribution from Fabian Wallmeier