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The Painted Veil Our rating: Rate this movie   Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some mature sexual situations, partial nudity, disturbing images and brief drug content) Genre: Drama, Romance Theater release: January 05, 2007 by Warner Independent Directed by: John Curran Runtime: 2 hours 5 minutes Cast: Edward Norton (Walter Fane), Naomi Watts (Kitty Fane) Liev Schreiber (Charlie Townsend), Toby Jones (Waddington) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

The turmoil of two mismatched lovers is set against the backdrop of social unrest in the latest cinematic adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's classic novel The Painted Veil. The couple, Walter (Edward Norton) and Kitty Fane (Naomi Watts), make a quick match in London before setting up housekeeping in Shanghai, where Walter, a doctor, is working as a bacteriologist.

Norton plays Walter with a perfectly pitched reserve that expands but never quite breaks as the character confronts his wife's affair with a fellow ex-pat (played by Watts' real life boyfriend, Liev Schreiber). Walter met Kitty at a party and fell in love with her on sight, but the audience can see that she is self-absorbed and the tryst isn't surprising.

Naomi Watts and Edward Norton, Jr., as Kitty and Walter Fane

It's the remedy Walter proposes that raises eyebrows. He will either give her a divorce and effectively make her a social pariah, or she will have to follow him into a sort of purgatory—he's decided to take a post in the north of the country where there's been a cholera outbreak and she must accompany him. It seems that here she will either die or atone for her sins. Or both.

Kitty follows the stoic Walter across the country—a China populated with steep peaks and waving fields, peasants and colonialists, disease and civic unrest. Shot in a remote part of the Guangxi Province, the tremendously beautiful landscape has a deceptively listless quality that belies the effort required to live and travel in this land.

Kitty and Walter on one of their China excursions

The epicenter of the outbreak is the town of Mei-tan-fu and as the couple settles into their new home, it's unclear who Walter is punishing more—Kitty or himself. More scientist than doctor of bedside mannerly persuasion, Walter is immediately immersed in the world of the dying where microscopes offer no escape from the messiness of death via cholera. His efforts to stop the spread of the disease are hampered by increasing discontent with Western influence in the region. Meanwhile, an increasingly bored Kitty is left at home to stew, with a bumbling bodyguard (thanks to aforementioned discontent).

The Fanes' only neighbor is a disheveled Brit named Waddington (Toby Jones). And oddly enough, as he is an odd man, it's Waddington who provides the catalyst via the right words at the right moments, to propel Kitty out of her delusions regarding who and what is of value. He gets some help from the local Mother Superior (Diana Rigg) who gives a speech that is both lovely and devastating about her own marriage to God.

Walter and Kitty travel to a remote part of China to fight a cholera outbreak

There is much about the love story in The Painted Veil that is awkward and offends our modern sensibilities. While touchingly earnest, Walter's immediate affection for Kitty in London seems naïve at best and arrogant at worst. And the narrow social conventions guiding Kitty's ideas and choices regarding marriage (as, by extrapolation, the role and worth of women in society) are painful given their proximity to our own day. But I confess I'm a bit of a sucker for love stories that start after the wedding.

In Mei-tan-fu, a love isn't revived—a love is forged. Neither Walter nor Kitty is a saint, and neither becomes one. But the audience does get to see a love of virtue take root in this relationship as Kitty stumbles towards a kind of redemption from her flapper-y preoccupation with the flashiest (and easiest) sorts of passions. And the process raises the specter of how the tangible circumstances of our lives—in this case a confrontation with disease and oppression—have a very real bearing on the intangible state of our hearts and minds. The Kitty Fane who was given a divorce-or-else ultimatum could never have imagined anything good coming from such a confrontation. But the Kitty Fane who runs into her former lover on the streets of London at the end of the movie knows that in Mei-tan-fu, she found a sort of salvation.

Talk About It

1. Why do you think Walter fell in love with Kitty? Why do you think Kitty married Walter?
2. In one scene Kitty scoffs at the idea of loving a man for his virtue. What do you think she is hoping for in marriage, and do you think her desires are valid?

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