The Painted Veil

Can this marriage be saved?

2006

Review: March 23, 2007

Director: John Curran

Starring: Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Liev Schreiber, Toby Jones, Diana Rigg

Probably would be nice, but not needed.

THE SETUP:

Couple’s marriage goes sour, he drags wife to a cholera epidemic.

DISCUSSION:

My friend and I wanted to see this before it left the theater, so we packed off to catch it at one of the few places it was still playing. It proved a wise choice.

We open with a gorgeous credit sequence showing antiquated objects and floral patterns with a few digital tweaks making it all very hypnotic and beautiful, while the score by Andre Desplat, who impressed me greatly with his music for Birth, begins. He’s sort of a more accessible, less overbearing Philip Glass, which would make him the heir to Richard Robbins of the Merchant-Ivory pictures, who followed a similar path. And this entire movie being in the solid Merchant-Ivory tradition, one feels immediately at home.

Then we join our couple, Edward Norton as Walter Fain and Naomi Watts as his wife Kitty, in 1927 China. We immediately flash back to Kitty’s home as a rich girl in London who her parents are trying to marry off. She attends a ball where Walter asks her to dance, and the next day her parents virtually expect the two of them to marry. Kitty protests that she wants to marry for love, and her mother responds “How long do you expect your father to support you?” Kitty storms out in a huff, opening the door to find Walter there, with a box of chocolates and a marriage proposal. He is a bacteriologist who works in Shanghai. Before you know it, the two of them are married and in Shanghai.

We see that on their marriage night, Kitty wanted to leave the light on, but Walter can’t do it and turns it off. By the time we see them again, we know that their marriage has gone sour. Walter insists that Kitty attend this Chinese opera with him, where she meets sexy sexy Liev Schreiber as Charlie Townsend. Charlie tells her that the singer is saying that she was sold into slavery and now lived a married life of drudgery in a strange land. Kitty is all enflamed, and Charlie tells her that he just made that up and has no idea what she’s saying. The begin an affair almost immediately and Walter finds out almost as quick.

Walter lets the affair go on for a while, then one day announces that he is going to small village in China that is the center of a Cholera epidemic. Kitty says he can’t expect her to go, so he threatens her with divorce and to expose the affair. Walter says that he knew she didn’t love him and just married him to get away from her mother, and she responds that it was his responsibility to MAKE her love him, and since he didn’t, it’s all HIS fault. I’m going to have to remember that one. Could come in handy in a pinch.

Eventually Walter tells her that if Charlie will agree to divorce his wife, he will grant Kitty a quiet, no-contest divorce. Kitty packs off to see Charlie and not only won’t he divorce his wife—Kitty realizes that Walter knew this all along. Not wanting to elicit the scandal a nasty divorce for her infidelity would cause, she and Walter haul off to cholera region. They despise each other.

SPOILERS > > >
This, by the way, is only about 30 minutes into the film. My friend leaned over around this time and said “Boy, it’s really galloping along at quite a clip.” And it is. They arrive in their horrid little house, recently available after the previous doctor died. There’s a funny moment when Kitty wanders in and picks up a doll from a stained bed and Walter says “I wouldn’t touch that if I were you. They might have died in that bed. This can be your room.” They settle in, both seething bitterly at each other and barely speaking.

Across the way is Toby Jones as Waddingtom. If you have only seen Jones in Infamous, it’s a bit of a shock to hear his normal voice and mannerisms. He has this wonderfully alluring and decadent-seeming Chinese mistress who lives with him. It’s not long before we learn that some British have killed some Chinese nationalists and thus there will be animosity from the Chinese. This is enflamed when Walter has to tell the locals, who do not understand about bacteria, that they may not draw water from the town well. And somewhere in here Kitty has had enough and writes to Charlie, taking the letter over to Waddington. He lets slip that Charlie has a habit of only going for second-rate women.
< < < SPOILERS END

I’m going to stop around here, and let you experience the ending for yourself. I haven’t thus far mentioned the presence of Diana Rigg as the Mother Superior of the local Catholic orphanage. And I’m sitting there like “Diana Rigg , hmmm, I know that name…” and it wasn’t until later I realized that this was Emma Peel from The Avengers! The movie goes in what I found to be a satisfying direction, and the ending will leave you with a little tear in your eye and a beautifully bittersweet outlook on life. For however long it takes after you leave the theater for your reverie to be shattered.

Everyone was very good, but particularly the two leads. Both of them have a rather difficult character maneuver to carry out, one that can easily veer into cliché or sentimentality, and they both make it believable and moving. Naomi is completely luminous and does a great job tracing the growing maturity and understanding of her character. Norton is very good; although this is one of those roles, like his role in The Illusionist, that makes you aware of how very unusual he is. I spent a third of the movie trying to puzzle out exactly what role he’d be perfect for. He is quite good at conveying the snide contempt Walter feels for his wife, and his reluctance to forgive her, his insistence on not giving her an inch because if he did he might find his resolve giving way. There was also a series of moments here where I found him sexy for the first time, almost impossible when we’re talking about a slight, small, clean-shaven hairless guy. Although my friend confessed to finding him sexy like, always.

This is just an all-round, well-made, movie movie. It definitely has travelogue elements, lots of beautiful and strange Chinese landscapes, the feeling of entering an unfamiliar culture, as well as a compelling story with interesting characters. It’s the sort of thing Merchant-Ivory were doing at their heyday, and if you miss them, well, here you are.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

Yes, if you like the Merchant-Ivory sort of thing; well-written characters given life by good actors, enacting a moving story in beautiful historic locations. Nothing wrong with that.