Director John Curran and Naomi Watts team up again after their seething ‘We Don’t Live Here Any More’ to mix it up with Edward Norton in Somerset Maugham’s gripping tale of a suicidal journey of anger and lust.
Warner Independent Pictures release. Photo credit: Glen Wilson © 2006
Norton is a brainy, self-absorbed medical doctor who learns of his beautiful wife Naomi Watts’ steamy affair with uber-stud Liev Schreiber. In revenge against her, and himself, he exiles them both to the center of a cholera epidemic in the nether regions of China.
There shrouded in the inscrutable mists of the ancient interior they both confront the horrible deaths of the local citizenry and their own troubled but passionate love of one another. In the end they learn that true love conquers all, but there is a terrible price to pay.
In screen writer Ron Nyswaner’s (Oscar® nominated ‘Philadelphia’) treatment of the Somerset Maugham classic, Naomi Watts is Kitty, the spoiled daughter of an elite family in 1920s England. Her harridan mother will not rest until she is married off to a suitably positioned mate and makes her life hell while Kitty fritters away her time in the over-stuffed salons of upper crust English high society.
Seeking to end an unsuccessful string of suitors, her father invites quiet and self-conscious doctor Walter Fane (Edward Norton – ‘Fight Club,’ ‘American History X,’ ‘Primal Fear’) to drop by one day.
Pushed to the edge of insanity by her mother and drawn to the doctor’s promise of getting away from it all, Kitty accepts his hand in marriage and the two move to the rich folds of British colonial society in the teeming city of Shanghai.
Absorbed in his work and slowly realizing he has nothing in common with his attractive, but dumb, wife, Doctor Fane draws away from Kitty who finds herself in the amorous clutches of sophisticated, romantic and handsome Charlie Townsend (Liev Schreiber – ‘Manchurian Candidate,’ director ‘Everything is Illuminated’). A highly placed diplomat in the yeasty richness of British eastern influence and a cad of sterling proportions, he ravishes Kitty in the privacy of her marital bed and then leaves her to social damnation when the good doctor stumbles onto their panting infatuation.
Norton, seething with internalized British rage at his thorough cuckolding by the untouchable Townsend, threatens Kitty with the social damnation of divorce grounded in adultery. Such an action would leave her either a street beggar or the eternal social pariah-slave to her mother who would dedicate her life to making Kitty’s existence a living hell.
When he presents her with the cruel alternative of pairing with him in fecund exile at the epicenter of an inland cholera epidemic, she has no choice but to accept. Off they go to what promises to be a permanently stony existence with her terminally frosted doctor of a husband who has terminated all emotional connection with his once beloved wife.
In their destination village of the dead and dying Kitty sees a child’s doll lying on a bed in their quarters. When she picks it up, her husband warns, “Be careful what you touch, it’s probably contaminated. That will be your bed.” The honeymoon is over.
In the course of the following months they meet the garrulous diplomat Waddington (Toby Jones – ‘Infamous’), also in self exile to give free rein to his life long love affair with his Asian sweetheart and his apparent predilection towards opium.
Kitty, waking as if from a long, self-indulgent slumber, meets the Mother Superior (Diana Rigg) of the local convent who helps her understand and accept her own long-sublimated need to feel needed, and perhaps even to have a family of her own. Her husband’s presence in the town has raised the hackles of the locals who are hearing daily news of the rebellions in the coastal port cities and the murderous control exercised by the British in their exploitation of the countries people and resources.
As he saves the local population from the painful and degrading death of cholera, the doctor and his wife are targets of the local populace and only barely accepted by their protectors, the Nationalists.
Lush photography of the mysterious mountains of the interior and the soft, deluging rains and gently blowing grasses of the valley meadows mix with the horrific toll of the epidemic to form the perfect backdrop for the tortured love affair of Walter and Kitty.
In the end, only the century’s old mammoth of Chinese civilization survives intact, along with the unchanging and eternal mountains, rivers and rains.
The Painted Veil
Directed by John Curran
Opens USA December 20, 2006. MPAA: Rated PG-13 for some mature sexual situations, partial nudity, disturbing images and brief drug content
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