(Berlin) Cillian Murphy is the best actor of his generation according to Christopher Nolan, who directed him in Oppenheimer. The filmmaker of Tenet and of Dunkirk must not be the only one to think so. The Irish actor is almost guaranteed to win the Oscar for best actor on March 10 for his role as inventor of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer. It will be well deserved. Murphy embodies this scientist consumed by scruples with remarkable interiority and subtle intensity.
In Small Things Like Theseopening film of the 74e Berlinale, Cillian Murphy once again plays a tortured and taciturn character torn by a conscience issue. In addition to playing the main role, the actor is one of the producers of this feature film by Belgian Tim Mielants (Will), presented among the 20 films in official competition. The two men met on the set of the hit series Peaky Blinders.
“I was looking for a film project that we could work on together. It’s my wife [l’artiste Yvonne McGuinness] who suggested I adapt Claire Keegan’s book, which I had read. I was delighted to learn that its adaptation rights had not been purchased,” Cillian Murphy explained at a press conference on Thursday.
The book of the same name by Claire Keegan, finalist for the Booker Prize in 2022, discusses the scandal of the mistreatment of single mothers by the Irish Catholic Church. Some 9,000 children are said to have died in “mother-child homes” in Ireland and 10,000 single mothers were locked up against their will in these famous Magdalen convents (which also existed in Canada), from the early 1920s to the end of the 1990s. The children were mostly given up for adoption. The mothers, repudiated by their families, were exploited by the Church.
“It’s a collective trauma that we are facing,” explains Cillian Murphy. I believe that art can be a balm for this kind of wound. It seems like everyone in Ireland has read this book. What is ironic about the book is that it is about a Christian who wants to make a Christian gesture in a dysfunctional Christian society. We address all kinds of questions about complicity, silence, shame. I do not believe that art has a duty to answer these questions, but to provoke them. »
Poignant story
Cillian Murphy plays William Furlong, father of four daughters and owner of a small coal delivery business. He works so that his family does not lack anything as the holiday season approaches, in the mid-1980s. One day, while he is delivering bags of coal to the village convent, he is stopped there by a young woman. in distress who begs him to help her. She sows doubt and shame in him for not denouncing what he knows.
Emily Watson is glacial, although a little caricatured, in the role of a mother superior with an iron fist, who we guess is tyrannical and intransigent despite her exterior mercy. She welcomes these single mothers into the convent who become, in a way, her slaves: laundresses, cooks, cleaning women without freedom.
PHOTO ANNEGRET HILSE, REUTERS
Cillian Murphy and Emily Watson
Those close to William, starting with his wife (Eileen Walsh), warn him: if he were to say a word about what he discovered, he would be made to pay dearly. “Your heart is too sensitive,” she told him, reminding him that meddling in the affairs of the Church cannot bring anything good to his family (his daughters study at the school run by the same Sisters of Good Pastor).
If Small Things Like These does not stand out for the originality of its production, it is a poignant story about the complicit silence of an entire society in the face of the hypocrisies of the Catholic Church. On this complacency which can be bought and exchanged, but at what price? A film about courage and cowardice, about humanity, with a somewhat insistent metaphor about dirty hands.
The essential remains more suggested than explained, even if we end up understanding, thanks to back and forth between the present and a traumatic past, the anxiety which permanently inhabits this enigmatic and almost mute William. Cillian Murphy, in most shots, infuses this altogether classic film with a depth of soul that can be read in every expression of his melancholic face.
“I found you even better than in Oppenheimer. Take it as a compliment! “, a journalist told him frankly (and not without awkwardness) at a press conference. He laughed politely. I don’t know if Cillian Murphy is the best actor of his generation, but one thing is certain, he’s a damn good actor.
Accommodation costs were paid by the Berlinale and Telefilm Canada.