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Kitty (Naomi Watts) had no interest in finding a husband and settling into the life of a married woman. But when quiet, serious Dr. Walter Fane (Edward Norton) asks her to marry him, he offers her a life of adventure—not to mention a way to escape her socially conscious mother. So even though she doesn’t love Walter, she accepts his proposal.
As soon as they’re married, Walter and Kitty leave for Shanghai, where Walter devotes more time to his research than he does to keeping his new bride entertained. There, Kitty meets Charlie Townsend (Liev Shreiber). Already bored with her husband and her life in China, she falls in love with Charlie, and they begin an affair.
When Walter finds out, he threatens to divorce Kitty and expose the affair—unless she’ll agree to travel with him to a far-away village, where he’s volunteered to help fight a ravaging cholera epidemic. Kitty sees it as a death sentence—but she agrees anyway. And as she tries to forget about the man she left behind, Kitty is forced to play the role of devoted wife to Walter, who refuses to speak to her. In her boredom, Kitty visits the village’s orphanage and decides to help with the children.
As both Walter and Kitty work to fight the disease that’s killing thousands of people around them, they begin to give each other another chance. And they start to get to know each other for the first time.
Based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil definitely isn’t a cheery, feel-good kind of movie. It’s a rather heavily dramatic film, filled with unfaithfulness and hatred and illness and death—so it’s not exactly something that will help you relax after a long and tiring week of work. And there isn’t a lot of action—so it feels a bit sleepy at times. But at its heart is a beautiful story—in an even more beautiful setting (and set to a beautiful score, as well). The scenery is absolutely breathtaking—and it actually manages to tone down some of the heaviness of the story.
While I didn’t like Norton much more here than I did in The Illusionist, he does finally manage to show a little bit of emotion toward the end of the film, much to my relief—though I’ll admit that I still had a hard time caring about his character. But Watts, on the other hand, is in her element, and she plays her role wonderfully.
Though you’ll need to be in the right mood to thoroughly enjoy The Painted Veil, it’s a moving—and stunning—drama that’s worth seeing, even if it’s just to take in the scenery.
