Noble (Stephen Bradley, 2014) Ireland

Reviewed by Linnea Nilsson at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2014.

Talking with people during the festival of movies they have seen and liked, Noble was one of the movies that was mentioned most of the times. I can understand them. The story of Christina Noble is an amazing story that inspires you to think differently in all sort of situations. That it’s based on a true story makes it even better.

The movie Noble is about Christina Noble, who is having an troubled and poor childhood with a sick mother and an alcoholic father.  She later gets taken away from her family, being put in some sort of catholic school. We get to follow the journey through Christina’s life, watching her picking herself up time after time. She never really had an easy life. When it feels like her life is actually going the right way, something bad happens and she has to try to move on from it. She always has a conversation with God, trying to figure out why all this bad things keeps happening to her. She later get an inspiration from a dream and finds out what her life goal is – going to help the children of Vietnam. 

This movie was one of my favorites at the festival. As I wrote earlier, this story is amazing. It didn’t even bothered me that I had to sit on the first road at the theatre; the story was so good that it was worth the small pain in my neck afterwards.  One of the things I liked the most was how they edited the movie. They had scenes with her growing up mixed with her in Vietnam. In that way they kept the entire story going in a really smooth way. They actually had some parts connected to each other. As, for example, her seeing herself in the children in Vietnam, with some sort of similarity with the staging of the props and where the children where. I really liked how her past and present interacted with each other.

When the movie ended, they showed some pictures of the real Christina with a text explaining how her work escalated in Vietnam, giving us some more inspiration that we all can make a change. One thing that I actually noticed was that Christina in the movie wore somewhat same clothes as the real Christina did on the picture. That’s a good detailed that I liked.

I am glad that the director, Stephen Bradley, listened to his wife, Deirdre O’Kane, who also is playing the older version of Christina, that convinced him to do this movie. It may have been the biggest hit throughout the festival and I wouldn’t doubt for a second that people outside the festival wouldn’t like it as much as we did too.