It's not unusual to approach a film involving a charity with both caution and cynicism. While there's no doubt the film makers have the best intentions in mind, you can't help but anticipate an emotional ambush of sorts, suspiciously awaiting the free phone number to flash up on screen, asking you to empty your pockets while a Coldplay song plays in the background.
Noble is an emotive biopic based on the life of Irish philanthropist Christina Noble. A thick-skinned Dubliner who doesn't take no for an answer, she eventually founded an organization halfway across the world from her native Ireland that would actively promote the welfare of homeless, abandoned Vietnamese children.
Her reasons are explored in this pleasant, if rather sugar-coated drama that recounts Noble's rough-and-tumble years growing up in Ireland, interwoven alongside her first eye-opening trip to Vietnam in 1989 as an adult. Publicly, she's gone on record stating that visions and dreams of Vietnamese children begging for help were what prompted her actions, but director Stephen Bradley attempts to give us the whole picture.
It's proper Sunday tea-time material as the film presents hand-plucked life-changing moments in Noble's troubled history through a series of episodic flashbacks. From her childhood in a sooty Dublin slum with an alcoholic father to spending her teenage years living homeless in Phoenix Park, it's clear that her own feelings of abandonment and neglect helped shape her motives later on in life.
Frequently, she confronts God in his own home, her faith naturally shattered on more than a few occasions. But the film clutches at straws when trying to convince us that her eventual calling in life was some sort of divine intervention, particularly when we see, as a young woman, that she is bombarded with images of the Vietnam War during the sixties - that and the fact that it's about twenty odd years before she sets foot in Ho Chi Minh City.
The film certainly isn't preachy, particularly when compared to the recent new wave of religious touting cinema that's been seeping into the mainstream, but it does somewhat undermine Noble's own compassion and hard-work. Moments of pathetic fallacy aside, it's often Noble's defiant spirit that pulls through, rather than the hand of God.
Frantically, she zips around the tightly crammed Vietnam streets trying to secure funding and investment for a rundown orphanage before her work Visa expires. It makes for some fast paced dialogue and silver-tongued Irish wit, portrayed particularly well by a teeth clenched Deirdre O'Kane, but it all gets a bit stale after a while, before wrapping up in an all too squeaky clean manner.
There's no question that Christina Noble is an extraordinary woman in person, but as a feature film, her life story begins to lose steam once it shifts away from the concurrent period pieces. Watching her run around harassing business men for money and puffing about how she is running out of time isn't quite as impressive on the big screen.
If there is an agenda with Noble, it's simply to promote the woman herself. It obviously managed to pull on a few heart strings, having won a number of awards at film festivals worldwide, but for a cynical, cautious critic like me that's not enough. Life-affirming and inoffensive it may be, but it's all a bit too glossy or cut-and-dry for my tastes. And yes - it does finish with a Coldplay song.
Leigh Forgie
