The Painted Veil

The Painted Veil is a lushly photographed film with a prickly narrative about adultery, cholera, and other unpleasant things. Edward Norton stars as Walter Fane, a doctor who convinces the desperately unhappy Kitty (Naomi Watts) to marry him quickly and travel with him to his lab in China. The two have a comedically tense marriage with general graciousness but hardly a spark of chemistry between them. Bored by her status as a stay at home wife and regretting her decision to marry the incompatible Dr. Fane, Kitty embarks on an affair with another local Englishman, Charlie Townsend (Liev Schreiber). When Walter learns of the affair he threatens to make a scandal of her infidelity (this is, of course, the 1920s) and bargains with her to keep things quiet if she’ll journey with him into the heart of a cholera epidemic in a small faraway town.

The narrative is a fascinating one and everything about the film is perfectly done, but none of it really clicks into place in the way that you’d hope. Norton and Watts make great comedic sparring partners and later in the film get to utilize their dramatic skills wonderfully, but I’m not sure that I ever really believed their performances. They never quite slipped perfectly into their roles and often gave a sense of falseness to it all. Director John Curran does a nice job here shaping the rhythms of the spouses’ arguments and photographing lovely Chinese scenery, but he too seems a little heavy handed and lacking in earnestness. It’s a film that is much prettier to look at than it is to endure. In fact, it’s so austere and so elegant that it sometimes forgets to breathe. Though the dysfunction in the characters’ lives is ample, it does not seem in any way vivid or relatable. The Painted Veil is not so much a harrowing movie experience as it is a rigorous one, the kind that leaves you exhausted but unmoved. It’s definitely worth a look, but it’s not something you need to run out and see immediately, especially during such a busy movie season filled with much better film possibilities.

Grade: B-