‘THE PAINTED VEIL’
Now forgotten, it has distantly spawned a far more beautiful ancestor, using superb Chinese locations (with those arty mountains that seem almost abstractly vertical).
Naomi Watts, though no Garbo, acquits herself well as Kitty Fane. She's newly a Mrs., having fled into marriage with bacteriologist Walter Fane (Edward Norton) to escape the curdling judgments of her snobbish mother. Kitty expects comfort, ease and fun, and is not in love with Walter, who is not very accessibly lovable.
Norton has primly pegged the manner of a man who lives for tubes and bacteria. This very minor Pasteur marries "for love" but mostly to fill out his kit for a stolid, dutiful life. He insists on lights out during sex, and the result is quite clinical, so that downcast but frisky Kitty is soon covertly bedded by the business sharpie Townsend (Liev Schreiber).
The affair is hot and facile, yet Walter isn't prepared to forgive. He responds with a cuckold's spite, and makes a severe offer: You can have a divorce if your rising, cagey lover gets one also (fat chance), otherwise you're away with me to the cholera-stricken innards of China, during the 1920s phase of warlords and Chiang Kai-Shek's rising KMT (Kuomintang party).
More stymied than guilty, Kitty trudges along, into a gorgeous valley stricken by the waterborne cholera (which cruelly drains its victims). Still a factor in the world today, cholera was once very widely feared, a devil disease. Maugham adaptor Ron Nyswaner, along with director John Curran, gives us a chilling sense of fear and fever in a rural cul-de-sac where beautiful vistas are backdrops for the mounting dead.
Though always elegantly, not fussily photographed by Stuart Dryburgh, the movie has a Newtonian form. Neat moral projectiles of plot are loaded, then launched to a target that unfolds lessons. Balled-up Walter's noble zeal to help the often ignorant Chinese (with grudging help from a local KMT officer and a warlord) must push Kitty out of sullen torpor, first from admiration, then shared esteem. Yes, even love.
It's about as pat as Chinese checkers, but the moving marbles shine. Watts, Norton and Schreiber bend their talents back into the 1920s capably, and Toby Jones (Capote in "Infamous") is like good Peter Lorre flotsam as a British colonial drifter, nestled down in obscurity with a loyal mistress. As a French abbess, Diana Rigg approaches the deep, clear wisdom of mother superior Edith Evans in "The Nun's Story."
That 1959 film was an even finer compendium of applied craft, atmosphere and moral force. "The Painted Veil" doesn't have quite the gripping pressure that Maugham built in his prose with such sober, masterly confidence, but it is strong work, honestly done.
A Warner Independent release. Director: John Curran. Writers: Ron Nyswaner, W. Somerset Maugham. Cast: Naomi Watts, Edward Norton, Toby Jones, Liev Schreiber, Diana Rigg, Sally Hawkins. Running time: 1 hour, 52 minutes. Rated R. 3 1/2 stars.
Comments (0)
Greater Paramus News and Lifestyle Magazine
http://www.paramuspost.com/article.php/20061229123903675