The Fainting Couch: Small Things Like These (2024 Movie) - ft. Dr Hugh Turpin

[00:00:10] Hello and welcome to a special Fainting Couch edition of Fetch the Smelling Salts. I'm Alice and today we're going to be trying something a little different. As you know, on Fainting Couch episodes, we cover topics that we don't always get to touch on when we're covering films. So today we're doing a little bit of reaching back to an episode that we did long, long ago, one of our very first episodes on the Magdalene Sisters, a 2002 movie.

[00:00:36] And today we are talking about a new in 2024 movie that I actually went and saw in the theatre. It's called Small Things Like These. And here to discuss it with us again is our pal Dr Hugh Turpin, who is the author of Unholy Catholic Ireland, Religious Hypocrisy, Secular Morality and Irish Irreligion.

[00:00:59] Hello.

[00:01:00] Did I do it good?

[00:01:00] Yeah, yeah.

[00:01:01] Hi.

[00:01:01] That's great. Hello. Lovely to be back.

[00:01:03] So you went and saw this in the theatre as well?

[00:01:06] I did. My wife and I went and saw it in the local, a local-ish cinema.

[00:01:10] You and I both have small children.

[00:01:13] Yeah.

[00:01:13] When was the last time you saw a movie?

[00:01:16] That wasn't Paw Patrol or something like that.

[00:01:18] Saw a movie in the cinema, an adult grown-up movie.

[00:01:21] Okay, yeah. It doesn't happen with nearly the frequency that it used to and it pains me because it's one of my greatest pleasures,

[00:01:29] being there in the dark, eating some Maltesers and waiting for the trailers to end so I can see the movie.

[00:01:36] It's just, I love the cinema.

[00:01:37] So the last time I saw something in the cinema, you know, I think I managed to get away and see something by myself at some point before this.

[00:01:44] Yeah, no, I saw Kneecap.

[00:01:46] Remember the Kneecap film?

[00:01:47] I saw that.

[00:01:48] No. Is that another grim one?

[00:01:50] No, it's not really grim.

[00:01:51] It's Kneecap are rappers from Belfast, from the kind of nationalist, Republican side of things.

[00:02:00] They've caused some controversy in the UK lately by, I think they took the UK government to court for refusing to give them an arts grant or something like that.

[00:02:09] And they won the case just in the last few days.

[00:02:13] So yeah, that film is funny, you know, it's good too.

[00:02:17] Kind of irreverent sort of comedy, detailing their rise, the environment in Belfast that they're from.

[00:02:23] So yeah, you should look at that too, actually.

[00:02:25] It's good, but it's not like this one.

[00:02:27] It's very different in tone.

[00:02:28] And it being around Christmas time 2024, when we're recording this, there are so many other movies that we could have gone to see.

[00:02:36] There's Gladiator out now.

[00:02:37] There's Wicked.

[00:02:38] There's the third Paddington movie.

[00:02:40] But no, we went to see small things like these.

[00:02:43] I actually saw this by myself, which was amazing.

[00:02:47] The theatre I went to had these like reclining seats and I got popcorn and I was just, oh, I was having a great time watching a very, very emotional movie.

[00:02:58] Yeah, it's strange, isn't it?

[00:02:59] To watch something like this while reclining and eating popcorn.

[00:03:03] Something almost perverse about it, isn't there?

[00:03:05] Sort of like sitting back, lounging, chilling, enjoying other people's suffering, you know?

[00:03:11] It's like, yeah.

[00:03:12] I think it was a necessary balance though.

[00:03:14] Maybe so.

[00:03:15] Maybe so.

[00:03:16] Anyway, we could wax lyrical about going to the movies all day long.

[00:03:21] So this being a Fainting Couch episode, I think we're going to do things a little bit differently because this is a movie that's still out in the theaters.

[00:03:29] And I think we'll maybe still be out in the theaters when we release this episode.

[00:03:33] We're going to do a shorter, spoiler-free summary of the film.

[00:03:38] Then we'll talk a bit about it.

[00:03:41] Then we'll have a point where maybe we play a little music.

[00:03:45] And at that point, if you don't want to hear any spoilers, you can stop.

[00:03:49] Or if you don't mind, after the music, we'll do a little summary of the ending and then we'll talk about that.

[00:03:55] Sound good?

[00:03:56] Sounds good to me.

[00:03:57] Yeah.

[00:03:58] Okay.

[00:03:58] Small things like these.

[00:03:59] It's December 1985 and Bill Furlong, played by Cillian Murphy, he's a coal man in Wexford, County Wexford, Ireland.

[00:04:09] Is there a different way to describe what he does?

[00:04:12] He delivers coal and heat.

[00:04:16] He's like a fuel.

[00:04:17] He's a domestic fuel provider.

[00:04:19] I mean, if you wanted to put it into some sort of modern way of saying it, yeah, maybe that's what it would say.

[00:04:25] But I think coal man is the way we would have said it when I was a kid.

[00:04:28] I remember coal men coming to the house and putting a lot of coal into this kind of dark room called a coal hole that we have under the stairs.

[00:04:36] So, yeah, he's a coal man.

[00:04:38] I was threatened with imprisonment in the coal hole more than once by my dad.

[00:04:41] I was going to say you didn't keep anybody in the coal hole, did you?

[00:04:44] No, I think I put my brother in once and that was not kind of me.

[00:04:50] So they're in a town on the side of his truck.

[00:04:54] It says that they're in New Ross in Wexford.

[00:04:56] And a lot of this was filmed in New Ross.

[00:04:59] Because we've recently covered the movie Brooklyn, I just want to point out that New Ross and Enniscorthy, which is where Brooklyn is set in the scenes where it's in Ireland.

[00:05:10] It's set and filmed in Enniscorthy.

[00:05:12] They're only about a 30 minute drive from each other.

[00:05:15] Yeah, they're pretty close.

[00:05:16] I don't know what it is about Wexford.

[00:05:18] That means all these films are set there.

[00:05:22] But my parents actually live there some of the time now as well.

[00:05:25] And Wexford quite near Enniscorthy.

[00:05:27] So I was there over the weekend.

[00:05:29] I've been to Wexford.

[00:05:31] Have you?

[00:05:32] Lovely beaches.

[00:05:33] A little beach cottage.

[00:05:35] Ah, lovely, lovely.

[00:05:37] Yeah.

[00:05:37] I can see the appeal.

[00:05:39] But this movie does not make it seem very appealing.

[00:05:42] No, no, it doesn't.

[00:05:44] Back to the movie.

[00:05:45] So Bill is a kind, gentle man.

[00:05:48] And his life is modest but good.

[00:05:52] So he and his wife Eileen, who's played by Eileen Walsh, have five bright and happy daughters.

[00:05:58] He's got his own small business.

[00:06:00] It's doing well.

[00:06:01] And he seems like a pillar of the local community.

[00:06:05] But as Christmas approaches, we see that Bill is struggling mentally and emotionally.

[00:06:11] He's plagued by very emotional memories of his childhood.

[00:06:15] So he grew up with his mother, Sarah, and Mrs. Wilson, the woman who took Sarah in when

[00:06:23] she fell pregnant with Bill as an unmarried girl in the 50s.

[00:06:27] And Sarah also had a lovely boyfriend called Ned, who was kind of a father figure for Bill.

[00:06:33] In 1985, Bill struggles with the vulnerability and indifference that he sees around him.

[00:06:40] And one of the places where he supplies coal is a Magdalene convent and laundry, which is

[00:06:48] attached to the girls' secondary school where his two eldest children go to school.

[00:06:53] Bill makes his deliveries very early in the morning.

[00:06:56] And in so doing, he sees a teen girl one morning being forced into the Magdalene convent by her

[00:07:04] mother and a nun.

[00:07:05] On another delivery, he goes into the convent to ask about an invoice, which apparently he

[00:07:11] hasn't done before, because for the first time he sees these girls working.

[00:07:15] And he sees the girl who he saw being forced into the convent a few days earlier.

[00:07:22] And she runs up to him crying and begs him to get her out of there.

[00:07:27] But he tells her that it's not up to him and he has to leave, but he's really shaken.

[00:07:32] And things get worse when on his next delivery, he finds that same girl huddled in the corner

[00:07:38] of the coal shed, which is outside.

[00:07:40] It's like an outbuilding.

[00:07:42] And she tells him that she's pregnant and the nuns say that she'll have her baby there and

[00:07:48] it'll be given to a good family.

[00:07:50] It's unclear to me whether she means that the baby will be born at the laundry or in

[00:07:56] the coal shed, literally.

[00:07:58] But anyway, Bill brings her inside the convent and meets with Mother Mary, played by Emily

[00:08:05] Watson, who is just a horrifying character who pulls up all the stops.

[00:08:10] To ensure his silence.

[00:08:12] She's manipulating the girl, offering him tea, giving him veiled threats about his daughter's

[00:08:18] education.

[00:08:19] And finally, she just bribes him with a bunch of money in a card for his wife, a Christmas

[00:08:25] card.

[00:08:26] Before leaving, Bill hurriedly asks the girl her name.

[00:08:31] She says it's Sarah.

[00:08:32] He tells her his name and where he works and urges her to find him if he ever needs anything.

[00:08:37] So Bill then has to face the week before Christmas with this knowledge about what's going on in

[00:08:44] the Magdalene convent.

[00:08:45] And for the rest of the movie, we see him trying to carry on life as normal.

[00:08:51] So I'll stop there.

[00:08:53] I won't reveal the end.

[00:08:54] And before we discuss, I'll just give a little bit about the film.

[00:08:57] So it's directed by Tim Milance, written by Enda Walsh.

[00:09:01] And it's based on the book by Claire Keegan, which you've read, right?

[00:09:05] Yeah.

[00:09:06] I've not read this book.

[00:09:07] I didn't know it was a book.

[00:09:08] Oh, it's excellent.

[00:09:09] But this film is also very much a Cillian Murphy project.

[00:09:13] So he and his producing partner, Alan Maloney, apparently acquired the film rights themselves

[00:09:20] and then pitched it to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and their studio, their film studio produced

[00:09:27] it.

[00:09:27] So it's had a quiet reception here in the UK.

[00:09:30] As far as I can tell, I haven't seen a whole lot about it.

[00:09:33] I haven't seen a whole lot of chat about it.

[00:09:35] It's being overlooked by a lot of these bigger films.

[00:09:38] But what's the reception been like in Ireland?

[00:09:41] Overwhelmingly positive for the most part, you know, because it is a really, really good

[00:09:46] film.

[00:09:46] And the book is, you know, the book was top of the book charts when it came out in Ireland

[00:09:50] a few years ago.

[00:09:51] I think it was about two years ago it came out.

[00:09:53] So it's been very positive.

[00:09:54] But there has been a sort of around the positivity, there's been this other kind of perspective

[00:09:59] that's quite present.

[00:10:00] And that's that maybe over the course of the last two decades in Ireland, as it's secularized

[00:10:06] rapidly and it's become more kind of liberal, this image of the past has formed.

[00:10:10] This is the unholy Catholic Ireland image that I talk about in the book, really, that the

[00:10:15] past was this bleak, dark, theocratic place.

[00:10:18] And this has been communicated in a lot of different media and films and that kind of

[00:10:23] thing.

[00:10:23] It repeatedly features on the stage in drama productions.

[00:10:27] There are many kind of films, TV series, and it's been kind of rolling in over the years,

[00:10:32] these kind of representations of the past.

[00:10:35] Now you get certain commentaries kind of saying that maybe this has become a bit one note,

[00:10:40] that maybe, you know, this stuff is true.

[00:10:41] These things did happen.

[00:10:43] But there were other aspects to the past as well that wasn't quite as monolithically

[00:10:49] bleak as is sometimes made out.

[00:10:51] And this kind of was triggered, I think, in Ireland, in the media, because Cillian Murphy,

[00:10:56] in an interview, he said he was talking about the 80s in Ireland when the film is set.

[00:11:01] And there's two things really triggered this wave of discourse.

[00:11:04] One is Cillian Murphy saying it was like the fucking Dark Ages.

[00:11:07] That's what he said.

[00:11:08] And he talked about various things that were taking place then in the 80s in Ireland.

[00:11:12] There was a case called the Kerry Babies case where a child was found abandoned and dead.

[00:11:18] And there was a kind of a complex kind of series of events around that where somebody was scapegoated

[00:11:23] for the murder, who was also, I think, you know, they were in a certain sense kind of

[00:11:29] undesirable because they were an unmarried mother and this kind of thing.

[00:11:32] And they were found to be innocent.

[00:11:34] I think that's it.

[00:11:34] I might be confusing it.

[00:11:35] Another one was the Anne Lovett case.

[00:11:37] A girl gave birth in a Marion grotto.

[00:11:41] She had hidden her pregnancy, then she died afterwards.

[00:11:45] And this was a kind of huge, huge event and scandal.

[00:11:48] So these are the kind of things Murphy was drawing on when he described it as like the Dark Ages.

[00:11:53] So that interview catalyzed a certain amount of reaction among more conservative Catholics,

[00:11:58] but also in the in the center ground as well was unusual to see that argument that he's going overboard made in the center,

[00:12:05] as well as on more right kind of fringes like the historian Dermot Ferriter.

[00:12:09] He's a big kind of historian, liberal guy.

[00:12:12] He had a column in the Irish Times about how perhaps this image of the past has become too monolithic.

[00:12:18] And the other thing I think that triggered it is the book itself and the film.

[00:12:23] It's set in the 80s and there were Magdalene Laundries operating in the 80s still.

[00:12:27] The last one closed in 1996.

[00:12:31] But the particular Magdalene Laundry in New Ross closed in 1967.

[00:12:36] So there wasn't actually one in the town at the point at which the film is set.

[00:12:41] This was a kind of extra, I'm sure Claire Keegan knew this.

[00:12:43] And she was kind of fictionalizing the setting for whatever reason authors do that.

[00:12:49] But this also has contributed to this kind of sense of, I wonder what's behind it.

[00:12:53] Almost like, do we really need to go back here again?

[00:12:56] You know, this kind of sense.

[00:12:58] But the other people would say that we very much do need to go back here again.

[00:13:02] So it contributes to this kind of discussion in Ireland about how do you deal with the darkness of the past?

[00:13:07] How do you ascertain who was to blame for the way things were then?

[00:13:12] All these kind of questions.

[00:13:13] The question of complicity, which is a really heavy theme of this film, comes up.

[00:13:18] There's plenty of talk around it.

[00:13:20] It's wild to me that people are saying that this is too dark of a film or too heavy-handed

[00:13:24] when The Magdalene Sisters, the film that we talked about on our previous episode,

[00:13:29] is so much more grim compared to this one.

[00:13:33] Like, for example, first of all, you're not, as the audience,

[00:13:38] you're not seeing a lot of what's actually going on in the laundry.

[00:13:41] You're not getting the perspectives of the characters,

[00:13:44] the girls who are in the laundry or the nuns.

[00:13:46] You've got Bill's perspective.

[00:13:48] And Bill's life is happy in so many ways and in all ways that you could put on paper.

[00:13:56] His wife is lovely.

[00:13:57] He's a lovely man.

[00:13:58] His children are lovely.

[00:14:00] As his wife Eileen points out, I think at one point of the film,

[00:14:04] he was very lucky in that he had kind of a miraculous life in some ways,

[00:14:10] in that his mother, Sarah, got pregnant with him as an unmarried young girl.

[00:14:14] And she didn't have to go to the laundry in the 1950s.

[00:14:18] She was taken in by someone, which seems like it was unheard of,

[00:14:22] but that she was taken in by a wealthy widowed woman who essentially raised them both.

[00:14:29] And then when his mother passed away, took over the care of him.

[00:14:33] Because it's not an insider's perspective, it's an outsider's perspective.

[00:14:38] You don't get so much of the harrowing scenes, those visceral scenes.

[00:14:44] You get more of the questions about complicity that are raised and the questions about how this could happen

[00:14:53] and how so many people could go on with their ordinary lives while all of this was happening.

[00:15:00] Well, I think you're putting your finger on it right there.

[00:15:03] Those are the actual questions.

[00:15:03] All of that is grim.

[00:15:05] Yeah, for sure.

[00:15:05] All of that is grim.

[00:15:06] Those are the questions that people don't want to face.

[00:15:07] Those are the ones they don't want to face up to.

[00:15:09] It's easier in a way, perhaps, for the public to digest something that seems to say there was this evil institution,

[00:15:17] the church, that took the place over, brainwashed everybody,

[00:15:20] and was torturing and imprisoning these women, you know, but that's now in the past.

[00:15:24] And, you know, this was something done to Irish people, not something that, to a large degree, Irish people did to themselves,

[00:15:31] to more vulnerable members of their communities.

[00:15:34] So it's the issue of complicity perhaps makes people uncomfortable.

[00:15:38] Maybe that's the topic about this film, because it really does foreground that issue of where does blame end?

[00:15:45] It's diffused across society, and that's something that's uncomfortable for people to look at.

[00:15:50] I think that's one reason why there's this difference in reaction.

[00:15:53] I think another reason is it comes at a different point in time.

[00:15:56] So when the Magdalene Law sisters came out, that kind of rapid intensification of Ireland's social changes was sort of kicking into gear.

[00:16:05] People, I don't know, maybe they were more receptive in a way, but now people might feel beleaguered by the whole process of examining the past.

[00:16:13] Like, it's been going on and on and on, and every year new scandals emerge.

[00:16:17] You know, they might be exhausted with the dark image, even if it's true in a lot of respects.

[00:16:24] One of the things that has kind of propelled social change in Ireland has been these referendums.

[00:16:30] So there was one in 2015 on same-sex marriage.

[00:16:33] It passed.

[00:16:34] You know, there was one in 2018, liberalizing abortion laws.

[00:16:38] It passed by an even larger number.

[00:16:39] And this was sort of taken as an indicator that, wow, Ireland's super progressive.

[00:16:44] Here it is, you know, the public themselves are making these transformations.

[00:16:49] But just last year, I think it was, there was another kind of couple of referendums on making kind of changes to the Constitution that would remove kind of Catholic moral influence further.

[00:17:01] They were very obscure kind of referendums about tinkering around with language, and a lot of people didn't understand what they were about.

[00:17:07] And there was a lot of surprise because people said no to these changes.

[00:17:12] They said no.

[00:17:13] The prediction, I think, in government was that people were just going to say yes like they had to the previous ones.

[00:17:18] And this is a useful thing for a somewhat neoliberal government that's presiding over a country that's going through a housing crisis, where there's rising social tension about wealth inequality, immigration, other factors like this that we see all over the West.

[00:17:33] That the government could kind of, well, look, you know, we might be losing the young because we can't give them houses.

[00:17:38] But look, we're liberal.

[00:17:39] Look here, we're doing a bit of secularization, guys.

[00:17:42] You know, come along and vote Fine Gael.

[00:17:44] But there was a kind of rejection of the government.

[00:17:46] And I think there's a sense that something is in the air.

[00:17:50] Something's changing a bit.

[00:17:51] This kind of almost optimistic, if outraged feeling that was so prevalent in Ireland in the 2010s of, you know, we're going to change this society.

[00:18:02] And now there's a feeling, I think, of exhaustion and a lack of optimism in Ireland.

[00:18:08] So it arrives in the midst of that where the sort of onwards and upwards trajectory of secularization, it's sort of derailed a bit.

[00:18:15] And, yeah, maybe it's just a topic people are a bit sick of, you know, in a certain way.

[00:18:21] Yeah.

[00:18:22] The Magdalene Sisters came out in 2002.

[00:18:25] And famously, according to my friend Davassa, everything in Ireland was shit until the year 1998.

[00:18:31] We've got a four-year difference there.

[00:18:33] And so it must have been very raw still.

[00:18:38] It was very raw, yeah.

[00:18:39] To have a film like the Magdalene Sisters come out at that time.

[00:18:44] Yeah.

[00:18:45] It's now 22 years later.

[00:18:47] And we have still a lot of things mirroring the Magdalene Sisters.

[00:18:53] For one thing, Eileen.

[00:18:54] So Cillian Murphy's wife, Eileen, is played by Eileen Watson, who played Crispina in the Magdalene Sisters, the most memorable and tragic character in the film.

[00:19:07] She does an amazing job in this movie as well.

[00:19:10] She's such a phenomenal actress.

[00:19:12] And I wish, I hope that we get to see her in more things.

[00:19:15] But what was so frustrating for me to see is that you look at, you're seeing Crispina, but in a very, very different character.

[00:19:27] She's this very happy, complacent, is complacent the word I want to use?

[00:19:35] She's socially complacent.

[00:19:36] Yeah.

[00:19:37] And she said when Bill tries to talk to her about what's going on, because he does, he does go and tell his wife the first time he's approached by Sarah when he's trying to get his invoice and she begs for help.

[00:19:50] He tells his wife about that.

[00:19:52] And her response is just, you know, there are things you have to ignore.

[00:19:56] The nuns are powerful.

[00:19:58] These girls aren't our girls.

[00:20:01] Because again, he's concerned.

[00:20:03] He has five daughters.

[00:20:04] And her character just says, you know, that they're not our daughters.

[00:20:09] These are other girls.

[00:20:10] This is happening to other people, even though it's happening in their small town, in their children's school.

[00:20:15] And it was so hard to see her and say, no, but you must, you must know how terrible this is.

[00:20:21] She should be channeling Crispina somehow.

[00:20:24] And so to see Crispina saying these things is almost unfathomable.

[00:20:29] Yeah, I know.

[00:20:30] When you put them side by side, it is really interesting like that.

[00:20:33] An interesting thing about the book as well, just a piece of trivia about it, is that it won the Orwell Prize for political fiction when it came out.

[00:20:42] Which people thought, that's weird, you know.

[00:20:44] But it is actually, it's almost like a study that you can transplant to a load of different situations of how social compliance works.

[00:20:51] How people allow terrible things to happen.

[00:20:54] And you just kind of like keep your head down, keep silent, don't rock the boat.

[00:20:59] A very delicate study of how that's possible.

[00:21:03] And yeah, to see Crispina doing it is disheartening.

[00:21:07] But it's something that we all potentially do all the time.

[00:21:10] Yeah, that can make it quite an uncomfortable story, I think.

[00:21:13] The question of power was really interesting in this film as well.

[00:21:18] And I wondered how realistic it was.

[00:21:20] So these are some of the questions that I had that maybe you can shed some light on.

[00:21:25] First, it was understandable to me that we've got this very powerful group of nuns.

[00:21:30] So everyone in the town, they're warning Bill, don't upset the nuns.

[00:21:34] There are these consequences if you rattle the nuns.

[00:21:38] But I guess I'm used to seeing women having less power than men, even when they have power.

[00:21:45] But in this film, Bill is very cowed by the nuns.

[00:21:49] He has the same kind of fear of the nuns as everyone else.

[00:21:53] It's not a question of like, well, I'm a man.

[00:21:55] I'm going to come into this situation and tell you what's what.

[00:21:59] There's absolutely no sense that he has power when he's faced with Mother Mary and her tea.

[00:22:04] And the other thing is that we don't see any priests in this movie.

[00:22:08] Do we ever see a priest except for at some mass?

[00:22:12] Yeah, that's a good point.

[00:22:13] You don't.

[00:22:14] It's like there's a particular domain, the laundry and stuff like what is done with people

[00:22:21] who have transgressed against sexual norms.

[00:22:24] And this domain is the domain of the nuns and the women.

[00:22:27] This is their fortress.

[00:22:29] And he doesn't have power in that world.

[00:22:32] No, he doesn't have any.

[00:22:33] And also he himself is, as he kind of says, he is what would have been called an illegitimate child.

[00:22:40] He could so easily have been born within one of these institutions and given up for adoption himself.

[00:22:46] And there is a kind of reference.

[00:22:48] You know, he comes back as a child in the scenes that take place in the past.

[00:22:52] And his jacket is covered in spit.

[00:22:54] You know, he's been kind of bullied.

[00:22:56] You know, at some level, he knows that there's something that's considered deeply socially unacceptable about him.

[00:23:03] That the entire society really looks down on people like him.

[00:23:07] So as a kind of illegitimate product of sin, he is lower again in the kind of Irish Catholic hierarchy, even than a woman.

[00:23:17] You know, so there's this kind of stuff going on, I think, probably within him.

[00:23:21] But yeah, he has no sense of power.

[00:23:24] I guess that can help us understand a little bit more about what's at stake for him as well.

[00:23:29] Because in spite of those beginnings and being illegitimate, he's still made a name for himself.

[00:23:35] As he says, his mother's name.

[00:23:38] And he does have a really good life.

[00:23:40] But that means that that life is also at risk.

[00:23:43] This life that he has managed to make for himself.

[00:23:47] Yeah, that's what the nun implies when she sort of alludes to his daughters who are trying to get into the good school.

[00:23:55] But they also run.

[00:23:56] So, you know, if he causes any trouble, he can be punished.

[00:24:01] There are ways and means of reducing his family's fortunes.

[00:24:05] And he goes up against them.

[00:24:07] He goes up against the entire society of the town, essentially.

[00:24:10] That's a way of kind of keeping him in line.

[00:24:12] We're talking about sort of conformity and compliance.

[00:24:14] And those kind of forces here.

[00:24:16] And speaking of Mother Mary, she's played by Emily Watson.

[00:24:20] And I thought, how dare they turn Emily Watson, who is so gorgeous and talented, into this evil, grumpy devil.

[00:24:29] But she does it so incredibly well.

[00:24:32] She's terrifying.

[00:24:33] She is, yeah.

[00:24:34] Yeah.

[00:24:35] It's that kind of low-level terror.

[00:24:37] That's really...

[00:24:37] There's a lot of that throughout the film.

[00:24:39] Low-level suggested terror.

[00:24:41] I mean, they even kind of film it in a certain way that makes you think of a horror film.

[00:24:45] People lurching out of darkness.

[00:24:47] Long panning shots of these rainy streets with blurry faces that you can't quite see.

[00:24:52] And it's very horror-y, you know, which was interesting.

[00:24:56] It is.

[00:24:56] And there's no music.

[00:24:57] Yeah.

[00:24:58] But you constantly get the rumbling of his truck.

[00:25:01] Yeah.

[00:25:01] You always know when he comes to the Magdalene laundry because you hear the geese.

[00:25:06] Yeah.

[00:25:06] And the thing I found most compelling was throughout, you can always tell when he's anxious because you hear his breathing.

[00:25:13] His breathing is so strong and at the forefront, this anxious breathing.

[00:25:18] But Bill as a character is very interesting to me being played by Cillian Murphy, who is known for these very intense characters in things like Peaky Blinders and Oppenheimer.

[00:25:32] But they're characters with a seething kind of darkness in them.

[00:25:38] Whereas he, I feel like what's broiling within him is more of a vulnerability.

[00:25:45] And he is outwardly this very mild-mannered, kind, meek, gentle man, which are descriptors I did not think could apply to a character played by Cillian Murphy.

[00:25:59] But again, he's so good.

[00:26:00] Yeah, there's simmering underneath.

[00:26:03] It's those eyes, Cillian Murphy.

[00:26:04] He can't not be intense when you have eyes like him.

[00:26:07] But there is that scene where he's kind of washing his hands, washing his hands, you know, and you can see the simmering intensity.

[00:26:12] There's something bottled up, bottled up rage almost that's so deeply repressed and suppressed and socially sanctioned that it can never really reach the surface.

[00:26:22] I feel that was something that was a feature in Ireland, I think, for a long time, the sense of being squished down and repressed.

[00:26:31] That's so much an element of Irish identity almost, you know, it used to be based on the colonial thing, you know, the Brits.

[00:26:37] But then what we saw in recent decades, I suppose, is this new sort of sense of the past that, well, the English left, but then the church was slotted into their place.

[00:26:49] That started to repress people and people couldn't do, think or say what they want and even forgot even how to say what they want, how to express opposition or desire.

[00:27:00] That's something that comes across in his performance, he's vulnerable, that there's some sort of, he has a panic attack in a truck at one point as well, you know, like that's, there's something really, really deeply damaged about him that can't quite make it to the surface.

[00:27:15] Still that being said, I kept waiting to be afraid of him and instead I was only afraid for him.

[00:27:23] Yeah, he's like a little boy still somehow, isn't he?

[00:27:25] Yeah, it's a sad, oh man, a sad character.

[00:27:28] Poor guy.

[00:27:30] Just, you know, just, yeah, I really feel for him, you know.

[00:27:34] Yeah.

[00:27:35] Because he's also, he's sort of noble as well, you know, he's noble.

[00:27:39] He's sort of innocent and noble in the way he doesn't, he doesn't appear to be able to quite play along with the games of compliance that everybody else seems to understand and go along with in the town.

[00:27:53] You know, he's struggling against this.

[00:27:55] Why is it that he's the one that struggles against it when everybody else is sort of capable of going along with it?

[00:28:02] Is it because he was raised in the big house, you know, by this sort of deus ex machina almost?

[00:28:06] I think in the book she's a Protestant woman as well.

[00:28:10] Oh.

[00:28:10] Yeah, oh, yeah, I know.

[00:28:12] So she raises him in the big house.

[00:28:14] So he sort of isn't maybe directly socialized into this tight network of kind of twitching curtains and spying and Irish Catholic social conformity.

[00:28:24] But he is also a victim of it at the same time, kind of witnesses it from outside sort of when he's growing up, not quite knowing that these people, this guy is his dad, for example, not quite knowing why it is that he's treated the way he is by the boys in the school.

[00:28:39] He's an outsider, which I think is an important part of his character because of the unusual circumstances of his existence.

[00:28:45] He's sort of outside the community as much as he is also this kind of pillar of the community that you mentioned.

[00:28:51] So we'll stop here.

[00:28:52] And if you don't want to hear the end of the film, we suggest you stop now.

[00:28:58] And maybe if you haven't already, go and have a listen to our episode on the Magdalene Sisters.

[00:29:20] Okay, we're back.

[00:29:21] Shall we talk about this ending?

[00:29:23] So it's probably no surprise that when Bill is trying to get on with his with the rest of his days, his lead up to Christmas, he can't do it.

[00:29:33] At some point, he's trying to get a haircut and he snaps.

[00:29:37] And he says, I'm going back to that coal shed and I just have to check and make sure that there's nobody in there.

[00:29:44] He doesn't have his truck with him.

[00:29:46] So he actually walks.

[00:29:47] And there he finds Sarah again.

[00:29:50] This time she's pretty beaten up.

[00:29:52] She's bloody.

[00:29:53] She's absolutely in terrible shape.

[00:29:55] She's freezing.

[00:29:57] It's obviously really cold out.

[00:29:59] And he just says, that's it.

[00:30:01] Come on, let's go.

[00:30:02] You're coming with me.

[00:30:03] And he actually carries her on his back all the way home in the rain.

[00:30:11] And people in the town see him.

[00:30:13] He's going up kind of the main road.

[00:30:15] People are outside, can see what he's doing, that he's taking this girl with him.

[00:30:20] And he takes her all the way to his house.

[00:30:23] And we don't see the moment when he introduces her to his family and explains what's going on.

[00:30:32] We see them turning into the sitting room.

[00:30:35] And that's where the film ends.

[00:30:37] And so we just have to imagine how the rest of all that went for him and for Sarah.

[00:30:42] Now, you and I, I think, had different takes on this.

[00:30:46] I was optimistic.

[00:30:48] I thought she...

[00:30:49] Because Eileen, I feel, although we see her being so complicit in the social norms that we've already been discussing.

[00:30:58] You know, why do you want to do this?

[00:31:00] Why do you want to help people kind of a bit?

[00:31:02] What's wrong with you?

[00:31:03] Why can't you just be content with what we have?

[00:31:05] Why are you worried about this kind of stuff?

[00:31:08] In spite of all that, I think she's such a good-hearted person.

[00:31:12] She has five daughters.

[00:31:14] Sarah is probably the same age as maybe her eldest daughter.

[00:31:18] I think she would have accepted this.

[00:31:21] She would have taken Sarah in.

[00:31:23] And then, I don't know, maybe they would have moved.

[00:31:26] Maybe they would have moved to a nice cabin on the beach in Wexford.

[00:31:30] Maybe Alice.

[00:31:31] Yeah.

[00:31:33] And Sarah would have had her baby.

[00:31:35] And they would have all helped raising it.

[00:31:37] And they would become fishermen, maybe.

[00:31:40] Okay.

[00:31:41] So, like, that is not what I thought was going to happen at the end.

[00:31:47] And part of that might be that I read the book, you know.

[00:31:51] Oh, no.

[00:31:52] Yeah.

[00:31:53] So, the book, it doesn't have a different ending.

[00:31:55] And the book is, it's also very kind of elusive.

[00:31:57] You know, things are not directly stated in it that much.

[00:32:00] That's, she's an excellent writer, Claire Keegan.

[00:32:03] And she's often compared to, like, Chekhov.

[00:32:05] Because she's a minimalist.

[00:32:06] You know, she just uses precisely the right words.

[00:32:09] And tries to prompt the reader to kind of read into things like that.

[00:32:14] You know, it's almost haiku-like.

[00:32:16] But that said, like, the book does make it a bit more clear.

[00:32:19] I actually have it in my hands here.

[00:32:21] Oh, shit.

[00:32:21] I thought, yeah.

[00:32:22] So, if I read you the last few sentences.

[00:32:24] It is a book.

[00:32:25] A very thin book, I might add.

[00:32:27] If I read you the last kind of few passages, you'll kind of get the feeling.

[00:32:31] Okay.

[00:32:33] So, he's rescued Sarah.

[00:32:35] Okay.

[00:32:35] And this is what I have to say.

[00:32:37] So, he's thinking about the woman who raised him.

[00:32:40] Had it not been for her, his mother might well have wound up in that place.

[00:32:44] In an earlier time, it could have been his own mother he was saving.

[00:32:47] If saving was what this could be called.

[00:32:49] And only God knew what would have happened to him.

[00:32:52] Where he might have ended up.

[00:32:53] The worst was yet to come, he knew.

[00:32:57] Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door.

[00:33:00] But the worst that could have happened was also already behind him.

[00:33:04] The thing not done, which it could have been.

[00:33:06] Which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life.

[00:33:09] Whatever suffering he was now to meet was a long way from what the girl at his side had already endured.

[00:33:14] It might yet surpass.

[00:33:16] Hmm.

[00:33:24] So, actually it's ambiguous, isn't it?

[00:33:31] You know, you could be right.

[00:33:33] Maybe.

[00:33:33] Maybe.

[00:33:34] But it also kind of describes his foolish heart.

[00:33:37] You know, he's unrealistic.

[00:33:39] He doesn't fully understand the extent of the social forces lined up against him.

[00:33:46] The quicksand almost.

[00:33:47] Well, he's had enough warning.

[00:33:49] At least throughout the film, he's warned by his wife.

[00:33:52] He's warned by the nun very explicitly.

[00:33:56] And right before he rescues Sarah, we see him talking to the publican when, again, I'm not sure exactly where we are.

[00:34:05] Are we on like Christmas Eve or a few days before?

[00:34:07] Yeah, something.

[00:34:08] So, the publican takes him aside and she warns him, don't mess with the nuns.

[00:34:14] They're the last people you want to mess with.

[00:34:16] And she says, keep the bad dog with you and the good dog won't bite you.

[00:34:21] What does that mean?

[00:34:22] I actually don't know because I had never heard it until I saw the film.

[00:34:25] But we can try and think about it.

[00:34:26] Keep the bad dog with you.

[00:34:27] The good dog won't bite.

[00:34:29] Yeah.

[00:34:29] What do you think it means?

[00:34:31] I don't know.

[00:34:32] It's kind of mysterious.

[00:34:34] And the way I guess I kind of interpreted it is maybe there are these two good and bad sides to the nuns.

[00:34:41] So, if you keep the bad stuff you know to yourself, then you won't get the wrath.

[00:34:49] And the public-facing side.

[00:34:50] Yeah.

[00:34:51] Yeah.

[00:34:52] Yeah.

[00:34:52] And it's something like that.

[00:34:53] Your friends won't turn on you if you don't chat about the bad shit you know about them.

[00:34:58] Yeah.

[00:34:59] Grim.

[00:35:01] So, he gets plenty of warning that this is a bad thing to do.

[00:35:05] I think he gets some signs, though, that it obviously is the right thing to do and that it might not be disastrous.

[00:35:12] He has these opportunities where he kind of turns away.

[00:35:17] He sees a young boy out in the street drinking milk.

[00:35:20] He turns away from that.

[00:35:22] Yeah.

[00:35:23] He's turned away from these girls before, saying, there's nothing I can do about this.

[00:35:26] I'm powerless in this situation.

[00:35:28] Another one, actually, is, you know, those scenes of the street.

[00:35:32] And there's a scene where there are boys kind of making lewd comments at girls, maybe even his own daughters or something, kind of almost predating them.

[00:35:40] Which, of course, would happen all the time.

[00:35:42] And the consequences of this would be, I suppose they did actually hook up.

[00:35:46] She got pregnant, that her life was destroyed, but the men will not be punished for what they did.

[00:35:52] The women will be punished.

[00:35:53] So, there's kind of gender power relations going on that he doesn't intervene in either.

[00:35:58] But he's a father of daughters.

[00:36:00] So, he's aware that once he puts them out into the world, they could be taken from him by these, you know, societies almost set up to try and drag them down.

[00:36:09] And so, yeah, there's that too.

[00:36:11] He's kind of aware of it.

[00:36:12] There's one thing that gave me hope was that he's having a conversation with Eileen, his wife, right, where they're talking about Christmas.

[00:36:19] And there's someone who's going to be alone or lonely or something.

[00:36:23] And she says, just bring him to the house for Christmas.

[00:36:26] And he says, you know, won't that be a bother or a burden or whatever?

[00:36:29] And she says, sure, the house will be full.

[00:36:30] What's one more?

[00:36:31] Yeah.

[00:36:32] And I really clung to that line, that ultimately that's going to be her attitude, at least when it comes to Christmas.

[00:36:39] Maybe.

[00:36:40] But, like, I think the guy she's talking about, he's, I think it's suggested he's an alcoholic or something like that, you know.

[00:36:46] So, yeah, he's, maybe he's a bit pathetic, but he's not this kind of stigmatized sinner category of person that's almost kind of disappeared from society, hidden away in shame.

[00:36:59] He's not, like, that level of socially controversial person to bring to your Christmas dinner.

[00:37:03] It's just, like, somewhat less so.

[00:37:06] He's just a lonely old loser.

[00:37:07] Yeah, really.

[00:37:08] Yeah.

[00:37:09] He doesn't, like, you know, he's not kind of inhabited by sin that threatens to spill out and contaminate everyone who comes close to it in the kind of psyche that I think they're trying to get at, you know.

[00:37:21] Yes.

[00:37:22] Right.

[00:37:22] And Sarah isn't lonely.

[00:37:24] She technically has parents in town, parents that these people might actually know.

[00:37:30] So that's another layer to all of this that I didn't really consider.

[00:37:33] What are her parents going to say?

[00:37:35] What is their reaction going to be to him springing her?

[00:37:39] Yeah, totally.

[00:37:40] Because if he tries to justify his actions and say, look, she was potentially going to die freezing and battered in this coal shed, then that opens up the door to people looking at her parents and saying, this is what you did to your daughter.

[00:37:56] So would they be facing any kind of consequences socially?

[00:37:59] Probably not.

[00:38:01] I would have thought that because everybody, I think the idea running through the film is that everybody in the town knows what goes on in this place.

[00:38:09] If they brought their daughter there, people know that the daughter is not around anymore.

[00:38:14] That, you know, there were rumors.

[00:38:15] Maybe she, you know, she got pregnant.

[00:38:17] Suddenly she's not here anymore.

[00:38:18] They know where she's gone.

[00:38:20] They don't talk about it.

[00:38:21] Everything is sustained by silence.

[00:38:23] And that's what Bill destroys in a way by doing this is just tacit, guilty silence that allows things to go on as they are.

[00:38:32] And that is what would make them turn against him.

[00:38:36] You know, it's not that they turn against the person who has done something wrong.

[00:38:40] They turn against the person who exposes the web of complicity that exists underneath this silence.

[00:38:45] That's the threat, that person that does that.

[00:38:48] I remember there was this book, The God Squad, that came out in 1998, I think, or 88, 88, sorry.

[00:38:55] A guy kind of revealed the kind of abuses he'd suffered.

[00:38:59] I think it took place in Wexford as well, at the hands of priests.

[00:39:02] Oh, Jesus, Wexford.

[00:39:03] I know what's going on there.

[00:39:04] But the book came out and instead of the locals, you know, being kind to Paddy Doyle,

[00:39:10] he was hounded and persecuted, you know, for dragging the church's name in the muck and for ruining the reputation of the community.

[00:39:19] And, you know, so that's the kind of initial reaction to a lot of these scandals in Ireland was not only disbelief.

[00:39:27] Going back to the late 80s, early 90s, these kind of times, not only disbelief,

[00:39:31] there's also a lot of anger at the people who were revealing what was happening as well,

[00:39:34] because they were exposing people who were essentially complicit and didn't want to be recognized as such

[00:39:39] and didn't even want to think of themselves in that way.

[00:39:42] It was forcing people to confront their own immorality, I suppose, their own spinelessness,

[00:39:48] the cruelty of their own morality.

[00:39:50] That's a hard thing to ask of people to make that kind of confrontation with themselves.

[00:39:55] Most won't want to do it.

[00:39:57] So what's the worst case scenario that we're looking at here for Bill and Sarah?

[00:40:01] I mean, there's also the issue of time that you mentioned before and that I mentioned before,

[00:40:05] that this isn't the 1960s, it's the 1980s.

[00:40:09] It might be a bleak place and your friend Devasa might say Ireland was shit up to 1998 or whatever,

[00:40:14] but things were changing at that point in time.

[00:40:18] I mean, I remember I was there in the 80s.

[00:40:21] Yeah, so we were both alive in Christmas in 1985.

[00:40:23] Yeah, we were actually alive when this takes place.

[00:40:25] I remember wearing my kind of little woomsie thing and running down to the Christmas tree

[00:40:32] and I think I got a He-Man figure around that point in time or maybe a Transformer or something like that.

[00:40:39] You know, outside influences were flooding in at that point in time

[00:40:42] and there was gradual change taking place.

[00:40:44] Then the 90s, you know, the change really ramped up very quickly.

[00:40:48] So it's hard to imagine that the consequences for Bill's family would have been as dire as they may have been in the 60s,

[00:40:58] where who knows what kind of ostracism would have taken place.

[00:41:01] The girls might have just, you know, decided to leave the country.

[00:41:04] A lot of emigration in the 80s as well, though.

[00:41:07] I expect, you know, it's probably just what the nun threatened would come true.

[00:41:10] That as younger daughters wouldn't get into the school,

[00:41:13] that maybe there'd be crueler treatment, sort of passive-aggressive treatment of the older daughters that were in the school.

[00:41:20] Sort of, their wings would be clipped a bit.

[00:41:22] They wouldn't maybe achieve the kind of things that they had hoped to achieve.

[00:41:27] Backs would be turned against them.

[00:41:29] It would be that kind of thing.

[00:41:30] I think the lives would be made harder in a million tiny ways

[00:41:35] as the community sort of turned its backs against them.

[00:41:38] It's hard to say one massive thing would have happened.

[00:41:40] Like, there wouldn't be a kind of, a load of priests and police turn up at the house

[00:41:45] and take them away and put them into some sort of Catholic gulag.

[00:41:48] Like, it probably wouldn't have been that.

[00:41:50] Shove them all in the coal hole.

[00:41:52] Yeah, shove them in the coal hole.

[00:41:54] Probably not that.

[00:41:54] I think a kind of social death by a thousand cuts is more the kind of thing that awaits the furlongs.

[00:42:03] Maybe they could all move.

[00:42:05] A lot of people did, you know.

[00:42:07] So, I mean, this is one of the reasons that Ireland was, I suppose, as conservative for as long as it was.

[00:42:13] It's because a lot of young people left to find their fortunes elsewhere.

[00:42:18] Left because there was no opportunity.

[00:42:20] I suppose that would have been an option as well.

[00:42:22] Huge numbers of people left in the 80s.

[00:42:24] Because it was a really bleak economic time.

[00:42:26] Yeah, they could have done that.

[00:42:28] And they could have moved up to Dublin where things were less intense.

[00:42:31] You know, I mean, that's another thing.

[00:42:33] We're dealing with a small rural town here, mid-sized rural town.

[00:42:37] I know Magdalene Laundries were operating until 1996.

[00:42:41] And the last one that closed down was in Dublin.

[00:42:43] But I should note this, but I don't.

[00:42:46] I do wonder what they were like towards the end of that.

[00:42:50] Like, I don't think they would have been full of newly dragged in women, you know.

[00:42:57] I think they were aging, institutionalized women that perhaps at that stage had nowhere to go.

[00:43:03] They were winding down.

[00:43:05] I mean, there was this program recently called, I think it was called The Girl in the Wall or something like that.

[00:43:10] It was on BBC or Channel 4.

[00:43:12] It was a kind of thriller series based in Ireland.

[00:43:17] The Girl in the Wall.

[00:43:18] Is this the one with Ruth Wilson?

[00:43:20] I can't remember.

[00:43:21] Possibly.

[00:43:22] Possibly.

[00:43:23] It was very over the top.

[00:43:24] And there was a lot of chagrin here because it was kind of, like, you could say that, okay,

[00:43:31] small things like these blurs the lines a little bit between the 60s and the 80s.

[00:43:36] But The Girl in the Wall felt like it was projecting problems from 40 years ago in Ireland right into now almost.

[00:43:44] You know, it was very kind of, it was a bit cack-handed.

[00:43:48] Just so we can end on a positive note here.

[00:43:51] Aside from my fantasy of them all, like the older daughter going to business school and then them all moving to America and, you know, setting up a coal.

[00:44:03] What would he do?

[00:44:04] Oh my God, he's a coal man.

[00:44:05] What would he do?

[00:44:06] They're all going to move to America and set up a new kind of small business, maybe an Irish import-export shop in Chicago.

[00:44:17] And they're all going to have a grand old time as a new bigger family.

[00:44:21] That's my headcanon.

[00:44:23] But aside from that, and in a happy place, should we try to give this film some awards?

[00:44:31] Oh, yeah.

[00:44:32] I mean, it's a beautifully made film.

[00:44:35] You know, I don't actually know what cinematography is, but I feel like this should get the award for best cinematography or something like that.

[00:44:44] And it's just, it's so beautifully made.

[00:44:46] Just the sound, the imagery, the cuts, the whole thing.

[00:44:50] But you can't, not on this show, you can't give an award like that.

[00:44:54] A proper one.

[00:44:57] So I think I'm going to give this movie best soundtrack in a period drama.

[00:45:03] And it's going to go specifically to the geese, because they were very helpful plot geese, setting geese, to help me know every time he was coming to deliver some coal to the laundry and some shit was about to go down.

[00:45:19] You could hear the honking of those geese.

[00:45:22] I'll give it the award for the most tragic hot water bottle that's ever been filmed.

[00:45:27] Oh, gosh.

[00:45:28] Oh, Lord.

[00:45:29] I have to go out right now, actually, and buy my children a jigsaw puzzle Christmas.

[00:45:35] And they won't understand why.

[00:45:37] They've not asked for one.

[00:45:39] Yeah.

[00:45:40] Don't give them a hot water bottle.

[00:45:43] Oh, I really felt, I felt for him so much when that happened.

[00:45:47] Oh, Jesus.

[00:45:47] So at this point in the film, when our tiny hero, Bill, Tiny Bill, has asked for a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas, and instead his mother gives him a hot water bottle.

[00:45:58] This is actually when I started crying.

[00:46:00] Yeah.

[00:46:00] And basically didn't stop for the rest of the movie.

[00:46:02] But I held it together until that boy got a hot water bottle.

[00:46:06] Yeah.

[00:46:07] You brought it right back to sadness, haven't you?

[00:46:10] Sorry.

[00:46:11] I mean, given the film that we're talking about is kind of, yeah.

[00:46:15] Well, we've tried our best.

[00:46:17] We did.

[00:46:18] We did.

[00:46:18] We did.

[00:46:19] Like Bill.

[00:46:21] Thank you so, so much for coming back on and chatting about this movie with me.

[00:46:25] Thank you for going to the theater to see a movie just so we could talk about it.

[00:46:29] I had to see it anyway, you know.

[00:46:31] But yeah, that was a pleasure being back.

[00:46:33] So if you'd like us to cover more films as they come out in the cinema, please write to us and let us know.

[00:46:39] Or if you want to suggest any films that you'd like us to cover, you can get in touch with us.

[00:46:45] Look, you can email us at fetchsmellingsalts at gmail.com.

[00:46:48] We're on Instagram.

[00:46:49] We're on threads.

[00:46:51] We're on TikTok, surprisingly.

[00:46:53] And just any way that you want to get a hold of us, you can do so.

[00:46:58] You can also go to buymeacoffee.com slash fetchsmellingsalts and throw us a few coins if you feel like doing that.

[00:47:05] So thank you again.

[00:47:06] And now we're all going to say goodbye.

[00:47:09] Bye-bye.

[00:47:18] It's all finished.