The Painted Veil

(2006, 125 min) The Painted Veil opens with a multilayered veil of painterly images, a kaleidoscopic presentation of alien, ethereal pictures seen through shadows and smoke, more dreamlike than material: images at a distance of a lush Chinese countryside evoking indulgent delectation, to be counterbalanced by up-close harsh realities.

We shift back to 1923 London. Kitty (Naomi Watts) is upper-class chattel, rudely and constantly prodded by her odious mother to find someone other than her father to support her. Walter (Edward Norton) is a bacteriologist, a quiet, focused researcher. As a middle-class civil servant, he’s not viewed as the best possible marriage option for Kitty. But she leaps at his proposal, eager for escape from a life she has come to find boring and constricted.

She is whisked away to Shanghai, where the newlyweds encounter the rigid English class hierarchy replicated in the small British colony. Walter re-submerges into his work while Kitty adjusts to her new environment — at once exotic and familiar. She succumbs to the oily charms of English Vice Consul Charles Townsend (Liev Schreiber), enticing and worldly to Walter’s reticence and introspection.

Walter discovers his wife’s infidelity, and reacts with the absolutism that so often accompanies naiveté. He accepts a post in the middle of a virulent cholera epidemic, and offers her two choices: come with him, or suffer an ignoble divorce (in which he would sue her...an unheard-of disgrace at that time).

They travel to the remote village of Mei-tan-fu. Walter chooses a severely uncomfortable and punishingly protracted overland route rather than travel by river; their bare shack and general lack of amenities seem calculated penance for Kitty’s sin. The effects of their mutual estrangement and the cruel threat of the disease are exacerbated by the rising tide of nationalistic fervor inundating the countryside. They are each challenged by their conditions. Walter confronts the enormous transition from pure research to living (and dying) patients; and Kitty finds delighted fulfillment in actually being useful.

They grow as individuals and find reconciliation as a couple, maturating in the face of adversity. Walter and Kitty come to appreciate each other through a better understanding of themselves and by an active involvement in the lives of those around them. Based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham, the film is artfully constructed and beautifully acted, with special mention to Norton as a master of nuance.

– Ann Yarabinee

© TLA Entertainment Group