"The Painted Veil"

This lush, romantic melodrama, starring Naomi Watts and Edward Norton, is an act of mainstream daring.

By Stephanie Zacharek

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Photo: Warner Independent

Edward Norton and Naomi Watts in "The Painted Veil."

Dec. 20, 2006 | Even as movies have become more oversized -- piling on the money and special effects in a grab for our attention -- they've lost the power to overwhelm us. A few filmmakers have tried to prove that there's still a market for historical adventure epics, but the pictures they've given us -- parade floats groaning under their own weight like "Kingdom of Heaven," "Alexander" and "Troy" -- have been lousy. Still, these pictures get made because they can be sold as action movies.

Lush, romantic melodramas are another story: They've gone out of fashion and out of favor. We've grown to prefer modest domestic dramas, pictures that take place in bedrooms and kitchens, almost literally in our own backyards. Equating dreariness with honesty, we've come to believe that seeing big emotions played out on an even bigger landscape would be too embarrassing, too gauche, for our modern sensibility.

Maybe that's why John Curran's resplendent, enveloping "The Painted Veil," a movie that would have seemed conventional 30 years ago, is an act of mainstream daring. Curran's last movie, "We Don't Live Here Anymore," based on two Andre Dubus short stories, was a drab tale of unhappy, philandering academics, a picture in which even the characters' most overwhelming feelings could fit on a postage stamp. "The Painted Veil," also a story about marriage -- it's based on a 1925 novel by Somerset Maugham -- is a wholly different endeavor, a picture that nods to the sweeping romantic epics that were still being made right through the '70s, by directors like John Schlesinger and David Lean, although not to the lacquered snoozers of Merchant-Ivory. (With the exception of "A Room With a View," a miraculous accident, the Merchant-Ivory outfit made a practice of throttling the life, prettily, out of any source material it seized upon.) "The Painted Veil," which is set partly in rural China (it was shot in Guangxi Province), is stunning to look at: The cinematographer is Stuart Dryburgh, and he captures the beauty of the countryside's plains and vistas without overvarnishing them. Even the score, by the gifted Alexandre Desplat (the pianist is the classical musician Lang Lang), is restrained and passionate in all the right proportions.

Sometimes even craft can't save a picture from becoming a boring exercise in classicism, a lost, nostalgic ghost. But Curran, his actors and screenwriter Ron Nyswaner have made an old-fashioned melodramatic epic that, as steeped as it is in the language and tradition of old movies, is never less than thrummingly alive. The picture tells the story of Kitty (Naomi Watts), a self-absorbed young Englishwoman from an upper-class family ruled by an overbearing mother who's eager to get rid of her. She rushes into marriage with the dutiful but dull Walter (Edward Norton), a bacteriologist who's about to leave England for Shanghai. The cultural adjustment isn't much of a problem for Kitty: There are plenty of her fellow English flitting about the colony, and she immediately falls into an affair with the casually dashing vice consul Charles Townsend (Liev Schreiber). Walter learns of the affair and, stung to the heart, tells his wife that he's heading to a small, remote village to stem a cholera outbreak there -- and then orders her to come with him. "Surely, it's no place for a woman? Why should I go?" she protests, becoming a delicate flower in need of protection when being a sexually liberated modern creature doesn't suit her. "To cheer and comfort me," he responds flatly, showing a bitter cynicism we haven't previously seen in this gentle, awkward fellow. He says he'll allow a divorce only if one specific circumstance is ironed out (it can't be), and so, reluctantly, she packs her parasol and a few cases of clothing and, borne on a chair across this parched, loveless landscape, accompanies her husband on a journey whose end might spell her death. In his hurt and festering sense of betrayal, Walter is hoping it will.

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