An inspiring story of faith

Noble (PG-13) tells the dramatic true story of Christina Noble, who overcomes a harsh childhood in Ireland to give her life to helping abandoned children.

 

 

The film moves between scenes of Christina’s life growing up in Ireland and her arrival in Vietnam in 1989, 14 years after the end of the war. Different actors portray her as a child, as a young adult and as an older adult, arriving in Ho Chi Minh City with only a few dollars and unsure why she is even there. Years earlier, she has a dream about Vietnam, a country “she wouldn’t be able to show you on a map,” and it sticks with her.

Christina grows up in poverty in Dublin. Her mother dies when she’s young, and her father is an alcoholic who hits his wife. Christina is a talented singer and shows great resilience. When her father agrees to have her and her siblings removed from the home and sent to a Catholic orphanage, she escapes briefly and goes to a pub and sings. Captured, she endures harsh punishment from the nuns at the orphanage, which feels clichéd.

As a young adult, she is on her own and gets a job in a factory, where she meets a woman who becomes a close friend. She survives a gang rape (not shown), loses her job and is taken to a Catholic shelter. There she gives birth to a boy, who is taken from her and given up for adoption.

Later, she marries, has three children and finally leaves her abusive husband.

This litany of suffering is all back story to the amazing work she does later. Despite her experiences, she retains a faith in God. The film offers several scenes of her talking frankly to God, sometimes in a church, sometimes on her bed. While the film doesn’t dwell on her religious faith, it also doesn’t provide much explanation how she remains faithful, given all that life—and the church—has done to her. We’re supposed to just accept that this is how she is.

After she arrives in Vietnam, she notices children on the street and begins caring for them. One day, she happens by an orphanage and convinces the Vietnamese woman who runs it to let her work there.

Overcome by how many children are in need of care and protection, particularly from sex traffickers, she eventually convinces donors to give her funds, and she creates a ministry that has now reached hundreds of thousands of children throughout Asia.

Despite the description above of Christina’s life growing up, the film isn’t as hard-hitting as it might have been. It lacks the gritty realism that a film with better production values or a different director might have brought. This tamer approach, I imagine, is intentional, since the film is geared to a more conservative audience.

And while it is geared toward presenting a message of faith, it doesn’t feel heavy-handed. Christina is clearly a woman of faith, though it’s not clear how that happened. Inarguably, however, hers is an inspiring story.

Noble is available on DVD.

Taking religion seriously

Few films treat religion at all, and most that do treat it with disdain or humor, while some use it to promote a certain religious belief. Stephen Frears’ new film, Philomena, is one of the rare films that takes religion seriously and walks a fine line between between criticizing it and acknowledging its goodness.

 

The film is based on the book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee by Martin Sixsmith, which tells the true story of Philomena Lee's 50-year-long search for her son. Steve Coogan, who co-wrote the screenplay, plays Sixsmith, a journalist who has just lost his job as a Labour government adviser and is at sea about what to do next. Then a woman approaches him to talk about her mother, who gave birth to her son Anthony at the convent in Roscrea, in Ireland, was forced to sign away parental rights to her son—but still cared for him until he was adopted at age three—and worked as an indentured laundry lady.

Eventually, Martin agrees to write a human-interest story, and he and Philomena (Judi Dench) begin their search for her son. In flashbacks, the film shows young Philomena giving birth, then working in the convent and being allowed to see her son one hour each day. Her anguish when the boy is adopted has stayed within her, held at bay, for 50 years. She approaches this search timidly, not wanting to offend the Catholic Church, which she remains devoted to.

Martin, on the other hand, grew up Catholic and has long since left the church and converted to atheism. He is vocal about his criticisms of the church and the Christian faith, though he lets up when he sees that Philomena is not in agreement with him.

They visit the convent, where the nuns tell them the adoption records were lost in a fire. Later, Martin hears that the convent deliberately destroyed the records in a bonfire and had sold the children to adoptive parents, mostly in the United States.

Through his previous work, Martin has contacts in the United States. He learns that Philomena’s son had been adopted by Doc and Marge Hess, who renamed him Michael Hess. He grew up to be a high-ranking official in the Reagan administration. He was also gay, and closeted because the Republican Party was “rabidly homophobic,” according to one character. He had died nine years earlier of AIDS.

Philomena had longed to know if her son ever thought of her, and it looks like she’ll never know. They eventually locate Michael's most serious boyfriend, however, and he tells them Michael is buried in the convent’s cemetery back in Ireland.

Throughout their search, Martin’s knowing, secular, unsociable self contrasts with Philomena’s naïve, Catholic, gregarious sensibility. On several occasions they have discussions about religion, and Philomena, the one most hurt by the church, is more at peace than Martin. This comes to a head in a climactic scene.

The screenplay, Dench’s typically fine acting and Frears’ direction make this a fine film that avoids sentimentality and steers clear of preaching a certain message. And its handling of religion is remarkably evenhanded.

The echoes of history in our lives

Colum McCann, whose novel Let the Great World Spin won the 2009 National Book Award, engages us once again with a multinarrative work that is more ambitious, if not quite as marvelous as his previous novel. Nevertheless, it is an arresting, lyrical work that is well worth reading and savoring.

TransAtlantic (Random House, 2013, $27, 304 pages), his sixth novel, mixes historical figures with fictional characters over several centuries, all with a connection to Ireland and the United States. It distills the reverberations of history in our lives.

He begins in Newfoundland in 1919, when two aviators Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown, prepare to make the first nonstop flight across the Altantic, to Ireland. McCann captures their love of flying and their strong connection to each other: “… they have long ago mapped their minds onto each other’s movements: every twitch a way of speaking, the absence of voice a presence of body.” They both see the point of flight being “to get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.”

The next chapter is set in 1845-46 in Dublin, where Frederick Douglass has arrived on his international lecture tour after publishing his narrative of growing up in slavery. He finds welcome and sympathy for abolition but also encounters widespread famine among the Irish people.

The third chapter, set in 1998, follows Senator George Mitchell as he works on bringing bitter sides in Ireland together for peace talks. After an agreement is reached, Mitchell understands that peace will only come if enough people want it. “Generations of mothers will understand this,” he muses.

Halfway through the novel, McCann switches from stories of historical figures to fictional stories of women who had some connection to Alcock, Brown, Douglass and Mitchell. This is where the novel comes alive.

McCann opens Book Two with a vivid description of Lily Duggan tending to wounded soldiers on a Civil War battlefield. Lily, who was a maid in the house where Frederick Douglass was staying in Dublin, is a widowed mother who has followed her young son when he enlists. After he dies, she remarks on “this fool-soaked war that makes a loneliness of mothers.”

Lily later marries and has five sons and one daughter, Emily, who is the subject of the second chapter in Book Two. She, a writer, and her daughter, Lottie, a photographer, report on the flight of Alcock and Brown in 1919. In 1929, they travel to Ireland to visit Brown (Alcock has died).

Brown confesses that he failed to mail a letter written years earlier by Lily that Emily had given him to carry on his transatlantic flight. This letter, unopened, becomes a symbol in the novel for the history that lives within us, even if unacknowledged.

The third chapter in Book Two belongs to Lottie, who has married, has a daughter and a grandson, and loves to play tennis. Back in Chapter Three, she was the elderly woman in a wheelchair who played tennis and told Senator Mitchell he had an “awful backhand.” Now, in 1978, she visits her daughter and son-in-law at their cottage on a lake, where a tragedy soon occurs.

Finally, in Book Three, we are with Hannah, Lottie’s daughter, now alone with her dog in 2011. About to lose her cottage to the creditors, she tries to find a buyer for the unopened letter she has inherited. Despite the implausibility of such a letter remaining unopened for 92 years, we as readers want to know what it says. One of its sentences sums up the theme of this absorbing novel: “We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us.”

Even if not quite the feat of Let the Great World Spin, a rare gem, TransAtlantic is really good. McCann has a deft touch with language, whether describing a beach “penciled by a series of soft sand ripples” or capturing the diction of the Irish: “Sure the two of us are deaf anyway.”

What moves the narrative, finally, is the voice of women, those whose lives run parallel, in the shadows, beside the historical figures we think move history. We learn that “the ordinary people own [history] now.”

When Hannah opens that letter she realizes a lesson this book teaches: “What mystery we lose when we figure things out, but perhaps there’s mystery in the obvious, too.”