The Painted Veil

In today's Hollywood Reporter, Anne Thompson has a rundown on the spat between Bob Yari and Warner Brothers over The Painted Veil. Yuri alleges WB isn't mounting the Oscar campaign they promised; he says, "Someone up there wants the film buried." WB's Alan Horn says it isn't true -- he blames the China for Veil's release delay and slow-moving marketing campaign. Warner China, a partnership between WB and the China Film Group, co-produced the film, providing unprecedented location access in exchange for final cut approval for the Chinese government. Director John Curran and producer/star Edward Norton allegedly haggled with Chinese censors over "38 seconds over six scenes," with Norton appealing to "family friend" Dick Parsons for help; Parson's lobbying apparently meant nothing to the Chinese government, and a compromise was reached. The film opens in New York on Wednesday.

It strikes me as strange that WB doesn't have more faith in The Painted Veil as an Oscar contender. It certainly *looks* like Oscar bait, at least on paper: it's a vanity project nurtured by Norton for the better part of a decade, based on a novel by Somerset Maugham; it's a romance set against a sweeping, exotic locale with slight politcal undertones; and, it's a vehicle for two Oscar-nominated stars (Norton and Naomi Watts), one which allows both to demonstrate they can emote in early-20th-century costume. In practice, it's a visually sumptuous mangling of Maugham with a handful of memorable moments; it's extremely classy, but mostly brainless. In short, it's Oscar gold.

About three-quarters of the way through, there's a lovely sequence no more than ten minutes long, in which the characters played by Watts and Norton -- who have spent the previous 70 minutes of the film blaming one another for their loveless marriage, with Watts' adulterous Kitty essentially held prisoner by Norton in a rural Chinese village in the middle of a cholera epidemic -- get drunk and tumble into bed, and proceed to float into what is essentially a courtship montage. Curran puts the sequence together almost like a silent film, foregoing meaningful dialogue in order to impart information through the clanging harmony of Eric Satie's Gnossienne and Watts' batting eyelashes. That sequence redeemed The Painted Veil for me, at least up to a point; there's always some pleasure to be had in watching good-looking people convincingly fall in love, and in this case, Curran and his actors manage the transition from ecstasy to inevitable tragedy nicely.

It's worth wondering why Norton, an actor who could probably have any role he likes, spent so many years of his life fighting to bring this novel to the screen. In typical Maugham fashion, aspects of the story, and especially its view of male/female relations, are at once alarmingly anachronistic and embarrassingly timeless. At some point, a decision was made to truncate much of Kitty's third act, ostensibly to beef up Norton's role and to take better advantage of the secured Chinese locations. As a result, Kitty's spiritual redemption, which is supposed to be the point of the thing, feels barely sketched out. Maugham's usual passion/contempt for women (or, perhaps more accurately, passion for contemptible women) is on display here, but the novel's turn towards genuine sympathy for its heroine is almost completely lost.

In movie form, Kitty is at best selfish and shallow, with even her eventual turn to charity coming off as little more than a self-serving effort to eliminate boredom. She seems to accept Walter's proposal initially because she assumes she'll be her husband's constant object of desire, not realizing that he's a serious man looking to acquire a piece of designer arm candy. Norton's Walter is pretty much the typical Maugham "hero": a seemingly weak man who lets himself fall for an insouciant woman, and then punishes both of them for her inability to care for him. Walter and Kitty don't fall in love because Kitty has become a different, better person; Kitty and Walter fall in love because Kitty's display of beauty and vivacity moves Walter to temporarily forget that this woman makes him hate himself. This is vintage Maugham; what's interesting is that the filmmakers chose to end the narrative with Walter's death, thus leaving Kitty, pregnant with what is quite possibly another man's baby, alive and redeemed by the love her martyred husband. Remarkably, Maugham actually gave the girl a bit more credit than that.