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| Tracey Ullman and Cillian Murphy in Steve. (Photo: Robert Viglasky, Netflix.) |
Cillian Murphy and the Belgian filmmaker Tim Mielants are a superlative team. Last year Mielants directed Murphy in the beautiful Irish movie Small Things Like These, the best treatment so far of the subject of the Magdalene Sisters, the notorious Irish order that turned pregnant unwed teenage girls into workhorses and then put their babies up for adoption. I loved everything about this film: Enda Walsh’s subtle, precise screenplay, culled from a fine small novel by Claire Keegan; Frank van den Eeden’s moody, delicate lighting; and all the performances, but especially Murphy’s. He plays Bill Furlong, a family man who runs a coal business in an intimate Irish town where the Magdalene convent wields considerable power – they decide which of the local girls gains entrance to their prestigious school. Their backing not only guarantees a better education but guides the students’ path to college and a promising future. So when Bill finds, hiding in the coal bin, one of the girls whose families have dumped them in the convent to sidestep the shame of their situation and she begs him to help her get away, the Mother Superior (Emily Watson) has only to remind him, in a friendly tone, how well two of his five daughters are managing in their school and how much they’re looking forward to admitting the next one in line to secure his silence. (She seals the deal with a generous Christmas tip; this isn’t a prosperous town.) But Bill himself was raised by a single mother, and then, after her early death, by the kind woman she’d worked for as a domestic; he feels his life was blessed by his upbringing at the hands of one brave woman and one with the means and the independence of mind to stand against the social norms of this time and place.