After watching a preview for "The Painted Veil," I knew that I would purchase a ticket to this movie. It promised a period film resplendent with the intoxicating landscape of China, the drama of adultery and the festering tragedy of cholera. I couldn't wait to submit to the full emotional onslaught of Edward Norton and Naomi Watts exchanging smoldering glances across a room full of highly contagious patients.
I had been too easily enticed by this neatly packaged, tantalizing two-minute distillation.
"The Painted Veil" is a movie that has the trappings of greatness, but ultimately fails to deliver.
Perhaps its source, a novel of the same name by W. Somerset Maugham, should have been a warning. An author who achieved great commercial success in the 1930s, Maugham never garnered critical acclaim. His work is often accused of being without, in his own words, "lyrical quality" or metaphoric substance. The same accusations could be made of the screen version, which, in spite of its sumptuous setting and majestic cinematography, feels empty. Its scenes mean to be powerful, but fall short in the abruptness of their transitions -- the power of the film's generally radiant actors is diminished by the jarring screenplay.
Brilliant film adaptations of good novels are hard to find, and brilliant film adaptations of mediocre novels are harder still. John Curran's recent version of "The Painted Veil" (a film was also made in 1934 with Greta Garbo and Herbert Marshall) is a movie that doesn't quite succeed in making wonderful Maugham's unremarkable text.
Watts plays Kitty, a spoiled 1920s manor-born English girl who marries Walter Fane (Norton), a guarded bacteriologist whom she clearly doesn't love. Dr. Fane's research takes the couple to Shanghai, where Kitty begins an illicit affair with vice consul Charlie Townsend (Liev Schrieber), and Walter promptly volunteers his medical services in Mei-tan-fu, taking Kitty with him into the center of a vast cholera epidemic.
What ensues is the painful progression of a relationship that began inauspiciously. Kitty is too self-absorbed and resentful to do much of anything, and Walter is too guarded and boring to change her. Watts and Norton beautifully portray the frustration and miserable self-loathing of their respective characters. The trouble is that marvelous performances from actors who are scripted to spend the majority of the film avoiding each other and grappling with inner demons make for a less than dynamic movie.
When the meat of the plot finally materializes and the audience is at last given action and interaction, the movie sparkles for about half an hour before it loses its luster again to a lackadaisical ending.
This movie's saving grace is the beauty of its setting. Each frame showcases first the dazzling frippery of English society and then the breathtaking landscape of an untouched China, where the majority of the movie was shot. With the awe-inspiring mountains of an 800-year-old Chinese village as its primary backdrop, the film glows with a clear and artful aesthetic that unfortunately falls short of salvaging the story.
