'Small things' are what we need right now

‘Small things’ are what we need right now

Cillian Murphy, wearing a knit hat, in "Small Things Like These."

Nov. 8, 2024 6 AM PT

We’ve been down this road before. Personally, I would prefer to take the trail my colleague Deb Vankin has walked several hundred times. And I might do just that this weekend, as I’m craving any kind of mood boost I can find.

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope’s Friday newsletter. What path are you on right now?

Consider ‘Small Things’

I’ve read two books by the Irish writer Claire Keegan this year: “Foster,” a lovely story of a young girl blossoming under the attentive care of foster parents in rural Ireland, and “Small Things Like These,” a novella in which the main character finds himself pondering a question many of us might be considering at the moment.

Is there any point in being alive without helping one another?

A film adaptation of “Small Things Like These” opens in theaters today with Cillian Murphy playing Bill Furlong, a coal merchant, husband and father to five daughters, a man respected for his decency in his small Irish town. One morning, making a delivery, Bill comes across something at a local convent that upends his world. And he must make a choice: Keep quiet and do what a neighbor tells him is the “sensible thing” — confining his attention to his family and business. Or he could do what’s right and take action.

I recommend both the book and the film, an exquisite adaptation of Keegan’s spare, unsentimental story. I’ve been thinking about it a lot the past couple of days, the idea of how small actions can bring about larger change, how doing the honorable thing instead of the “sensible” thing can help transform a society into one that’s fair for all.

“I love her writing because it isn’t dogmatic,” Murphy told me when we spoke last year about his lead turn in “Oppenheimer,” which won him an Oscar. “I think people will relate to what the character goes through and the decision he makes in the end. It gives you something to contemplate. I like that.”

You might too.

A bl;ack-and-white portrait of Cillian Murphy, his fingers against his chin

‘Emilia Pérez’ starts streaming on Wednesday

I enjoyed how my old friend Robert Abele began this review for The Times: “A lawyer, a kingpin and his wife walk into a musical, and ‘Emilia Pérez’ is born.”

I caught Jacques Audiard’s film, a musical soap opera about a Mexican cartel boss looking to transition to being a woman, at the Telluride Film Festival a couple of months ago, and as in all of the filmmaker’s work, there’s a lot going on. As Robert notes, Audiard has taken his biggest swing yet, “using its Mexican milieu of cartels and suffering as the basis for a full-throated Spanish-language sing-a-thon built around a gender reassignment — one that effectively, if unwittingly, triggers a nation’s ache for change.”

The film’s leading women — Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz and Zoe Saldaña — won best actress honors at its Cannes premiere, and the film took the Jury Prize. It is a movie we’ll be discussing a great deal in the upcoming months. It’s imperfect but also, often, irresistible. Let me know what you think after you see it.

Thanks, as always, for reading. See you on the trail.