The Painted Veil
John Curran's The Painted Veil is a great big conventional movie about romance and reconciliation set against a dramatic background, and as such it will be dismissed by filmgoers who prefer edgier fare. Its story, from a novella by W S Maugham, is sheer opera: having discovered his wife's infidelity, a British MD serving as a laboratory scientist in Shanghai blackmails his wife into accompanying him into the heart of a rural cholera epidemic (the year is 1925). On her remote hillside, the wife grows up, volunteers at the orphanage, and eventually wins back her husband's love, but of course it is Too Late. The movie is shot with the cinematic equivalent of big Verdi arias, and anyone who likes grand old Hollywood dramas will fall in love with it. The sugarloaf mountains of the Guilin region of Guangxi Province provide China's most picturesque scenery. Diana Rigg, as a French nun, is almost as craggy and every bit as beautiful. Edward Norton is very fine as the cuckolded doctor; there are things in this film that the actor has not done before. Liev Schreiber is droll as a suave cad, and Toby Jones demonstrates that he can be terrific even when he's not impersonating Truman Capote. The movie belongs, ultimately, to Naomi Watts, and for the same reason that Up at the Villa belongs to Kristen Scott Thomas and Being Julia belongs to Annette Bening: Maugham wrote great women's stories. They're period pieces now, but they still work. They were notorious for their sexiness when they were new; now they're simply and easily adult. Ms Watts is, perhaps for the first time, wholly adult. She's young and foolish but she is not a girl. This is a movie for grownups.
Speaking of adult, I saw The Painted Veil at the Angelika. As I was walking back to the subway along Bleecker Street, I saw a grotesque advertisement on the side of a building. Between the cellphone and my palsied hand, I couldn't hope for a clear picture, but this is clear enough. The legend reads "Happy Holidays from Adult Swim." Those huge mouths, full of too many teeth, are fascinating and monstrous.
