Co-produced and co-starring Naomi Watts and Edward Norton, W. Somerset Maugham's novel comes to life in living color. Beautiful cinematography and symphonic music embellish a wonderful, heart-warming story of love and forgiveness.Kitty (Watts) is getting older. Living in 1920's London, her parents have more to say with impunity about her suitors. Quick to pursue her, Walter Fane (Norton) pushes himself for courtship against her wishes, but the timing leaves her no choice but wedlock. Interrupted in their social life, they become a foursome with Charlie Townsend (Liev Schreiber) and his wife. Charlie, a virile alternative to her drab, doctor husband, tempts her into adultery. In such an arrangement, women didn't have the freedoms they do now. So when Walter is assigned to treat a cholera epidemic in Shanghai, he's privy to her affair and can blackmail her to come along or face the scorn of divorce. Since her lover is a playboy who abhors attachment anyway, she again has no choice.
Life in China at first offers nothing more than disease and disenchantment. Bored with her life and keeping in seclusion to avoid cholera, her husband spreads nothing but flinty resentment toward her unfaithful presence. Besides a stunning landscape, she discovers a convent where a wise, old mother superior charms her heart and inspires her to do at first repellant work with the orphans. Besides the dangers of disease, the locals are slow to warm up to any foreigner's presence, even one that may offer a solution to their health crisis.
More moving than its beautiful cinematography, Norton's and Watt's splendid performances work well with a captivating story of lust and love, betrayal and forgiveness, and selfishness turned to self-giving. While some viewers may find some of the old-fashioned elements of the film languorous in places, I feel the picture clocks in just right for the state of affairs. Superbly crafted, 'Painted Veil' is complete with a heart-melting beauty for the soul as well as for the eyes.
This film is not to everyone's taste, but I found it extraordinary. This kind of film typically attracts those who like films like The English Patient (which I hated) and The Horse Whisperer (which I loved). This is a period piece that doesn't need its period to be relevant. This is a location film that doesn't need its location to be believable. This is a slow-moving story that doesn't need action to be engrossing. This is a masterpiece that doesn't need improvement.
The story is both simple and multi-layered. Naomi Watts, totally unrecognizable from her The Ring and King Kong films, is basically a spoiled brat who would prefer to live off her father's money than to buy into the trappings of marriage (as she sees it). In a moment of spiteful rage against her mother, she intentionally marries a "civil servant" (one viewed beneath her), extremely well-played by Edward (American History X) Norton who equally disappears into his role as a shy man who is rather infatuated with Watts but respectful of the fact she doesn't love him, but hopes she will one day over time. This is a time when arranged marriages were common and for a husband to be as respectful as Norton's role is refreshing. He never forces himself on his wife and she does eventually warm up to him, but considers him a terrible bore.
No spoiler here to mention that the first interesting man that comes along, Liev Schreiber who is effectively self-centered, she beds in her own home. Later, to her surprise, her husband is not only not a blind fool like she thought, but is keenly aware of how people react to situations and has a better understanding of the more base emotions than his self-centered wife. For all her so-called worldly wisdom, she can't read emotions or people very well at all and has little understanding of the consequences of her own actions as she blames the man she willingly married (to spite her mom) for her own affair because he wasn't interesting to her.
In what appears to be retaliation for his wife's callous indiscretion, Norton, who has been quiet and respectful, comes down hard on his wife and volunteers to become a doctor in a remote town in China where they are dropping like flies due to an infectious illness. He knows it may spell certain death to both of them. He offers her the choice of an ugly discrediting divorce for infidelity, which will bring down her politician lover, or go with him. In this time period, that is no choice at all. She goes with him and, at first, we believe him to be incredibly cruel in doing this until we see him at work.
We identify more with Watt's shock at going to this deadly village and are appalled that Norton would do this as "punishment" regardless of the terrible thing she did to him, but we gradually learn that he is actually motivated to save others even at great risk to himself and he had been planning this for awhile and at a time when he might have been able to trust his wife to not have affairs. In addition, either intentionally or unintentionally, we are never sure, Norton gets his wife to see something admirable in him. He may have seemed initially cruel to his wife and he may well have intended this trip as some kind of punishment to both he and his wife, however, he is a multi-layered character who consistently surprises us (and his wife). So much for being "boring."
To give away more would spoil the story, but this is a memorable film that is touching and honest in how it deals with our basic human emotions of love, hate, jealousy, and personal desires. I highly recommend this film, but I'm aware that this kind of story may not appeal to everyone. Even if this is not your typical genre, give it a try. You have nothing to lose but two hours of time and everything to gain by having your deepest emotions touched. Some stories portray life in many shades and make all the shades look equally remarkable, even though some shades are bright and some are truly gloomy. The Painted Veil is an outstanding example of such a versatlie story. The movie brilliantly narrates the lives of a couple who marry to pursue conflicting goals and end up uniting in every way. Ed Norton and Naomi Watts deliver one of the best performances of their lives and leave the audience spell bound in a movie that boasts of nothing dramatic and yet is a drama in the purest form. Set in England and China of 1920's, this movie depicts the love, the lack of it, and again the love between a couple whose pursuits were different but led them to one goal. To sum it, The Painted Veil is a sedate, sober and yet stunningly beautiful movie that will engage and enthrall you.
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Lift not the painted veil which those who liveCall Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread,--behind, lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear.
"The Painted Veil" is old school, not just because it is based on W. Somerset Maugham's 1925 novel, but also because this 2006 movie has sensibilities more akin to the Hollywood of the 1930s (when the movie was first filmed with Greta Garbo and Herbert Marshall), than of today. There was a story in the news this week about a controversial and racy billboard in Chicago that proclaimed "Life's short. Get a divorce." The billboard was taken down after a week, over the objections of the two divorce attorneys who put it up, but there is no denying that divorces have become a lot more popular since Maugham's day (the high water marked was 1980 in the U.S. when the divorce rate topped out at 41%). I bring this up because "The Painted Veil" is about two people who do not get divorced, and not because they are staying together for the sake of the children, because there are not any children. It is a love story, but one of the most unromantic ones that I have ever seen, which is, rather surprisingly, not a bad thing.
Kitty Garstin (Naomi Watts) is the daughter of an unambitious solicitor whose inflated idea of herself has seen her reject all possible suitors. But when her younger sister marries and her mother (Maggie Steed) asks pointedly how long she intends to live off of her father, the confluence of events compels her to accept the marriage proposal of Walter Fane (Edward Norton), a young bacteriologist who is heading off to China. This is hardly the foundation for a marriage and in Hong Kong the bored Kitty ends up having an affair with Charlie Townsend (Liev Schreiber). When Walter discovers the affair he agrees to let Kitty divorce him if Townsend will divorce his wife and agree to marry Kitty. When Townsend refuses Kitty is stunned, and with nowhere else to go she follows Walter as he volunteers to deal with a cholera epidemic in the interior of China. It is there that the husband and wife find themselves changing.
The title of "The Painted Veil" is taken from a sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley, the opening sestet of which is quoted above, and I find it insightful that Maugham's characters do not take the poet's advice. Almost of as much interest as what is happening between Walter and Kitty is the way he comes to understand that all of his scientific and medical knowledge is of no value if he cannot persuade the locals how to deal with the epidemic. This is a minor part of the story, and it is the omnipresent threat of cholera that is of more importance to the way things work out in "The Painted Veil," but still a nice little critique of the arrogance of Europeans in dealing with the Third World in the screenplay by Ron Nyswaner ("Philadelphia").
Director John Curran ("We Don't Live Here Anymore") was able to film the entire movie in China, but the beautiful vistas shot by Stuart Dryburgh ("The Piano") serve as the setting for the story and never overwhelm it the way that usually happens in a David Lean epic. The performances by the main characters, including Toby Jones as Waddington and Diana Rigg as the Mother Superior, are uniformly understated in keeping with the cultured reserve of their characters, and that may well explain why my appreciation for the moment of mutual redemption for Kitty and Walter is more intellectual than emotional. Of course, back in the day this story was probably as much of a stiff-upper lip tearjerker as you were going to find in literature.
Final Note: The only extra you will find on this DVD is a trailer for the movie, but unless I have gone completely insane this is a different trailer than the one I saw on other DVDs that inspired me to check out this movie. This one gives away specific details regarding the characters and plots that I do not remember seeing in that other trailer, which is why I was able to get into this movie with no expectations beyond that indicated by the presence of Norton, Watts and company that this film was going to take the high road (Update: I found that other trailer on another DVD and, indeed, it gives away very little of the story, which is much more effective than the one accompanying the actual movie).
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If you like a story that deals with the basics of human experience---what love is and what it is not... you will enjoy this film. If you want lots of noise, speed and sensation, rush down to your local Cineplex where you'll find lots of trash that will satisfy your taste.We see how the main characters are thrown together by circumstances and how their decisions shape their lives. I didn't read the novel so I can't comment on how well the film adapts it but I found it to be very complete and satisfying, which is not always the case when a screenwriter has to cram hundreds of pages into into a two hour script.
You can tell that this was a labor of love for Ed Norton, whose performance as the repressed doctor is perfect. His character is awkward and shy, more at home in a laboratory than at a party. He is hardly attractive and so is powerfully attracted to his opposite--a beautiful, careless socialite who has nothing on her mind other than disliking her dreadful mother. Her mother forces her marry, or be cut off from support, so having no other option in sight, she accepts the proposal of this hapless doctor.
A recipe for disaster! They go to China, where she is temporarily distracted, by another expatriot, a charming, married fellow, who possesses all the excitement that her poor husband lacks and they soon fall into something like love. When her husband discovers her affair he forces her to accompany him to rural China, where cholera is ravaging the population. Wow! If she thought life back in London was a bummer, this brings misery to a whole new level!
Besides cholera, there is political unrest, so danger presents itself on all sides. She and her husband soon detest each other and she tries to contact her ex-lover to rescue her. Alas! she learns that she was only one of a string of dalliances that this cad had indulged in.
I won't divulge the rest of the story. See this and enjoy it for yourself!
Naomi Watts' performance equals Norton's and they are fascinating to watch as each of them evolves. The shots of China are lovely without being overwhelming. This is a perfectly satisfying movie on all levels.
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