The Painted Veil (2006)

Premise: Kitty (Naomi Watts) marries Dr. Walter Fane (Edward Norton), who whisks her away from London to Shanghai. Bored with married life and her staid husband, Kitty begins an affair with Charlie Townsend (Liev Schreiber). When Walter discovers the affair, he drags Kitty to a remote village in the cholera-infested interior in 1925.

I know that some of you have been waiting with breath that is bated for my Top 10 list. I decided when I opened my Bytowne guide in January that it would have to wait until I got the chance to see this movie, which wasn't playing until March. As such, gentle reader, you have had to wait. Fortunately, patience is virtue, and you shall be rewarded in short order.

Although it was composer Alexandre Desplat's other score that received most of the attention this year, I found this one to be a much more masterful turn. It may seem odd to you to begin a review with the score, but the movie begins with the score gloriously out in the open, richly swirling about you. The theme envelopes the audience from the opening frame.

I found myself a bit resistant to the framing device early in the film, but I was able to settle into it. Watts brings a breathtaking openness to her roles, and she does astounding things with her silences. I think the think I like best about her, however, is how she is slowly growing on me. I can see her still smoothing out the wrinkles in her performances. She hasn't quite gotten to the point where I am convinced that she is fully embodying someone else, but she's getting very close. It's nice to see it happen.

Norton once again proves that he is among the greatest living actors, with a spectacular accent and quite a nice seat.* I was charmed Walter's early, bumbling attempts at wooing Kitty, surprised but not shocked by the depth of his desire to hurt Kitty, and seduced anew by the man he grew into in the face of the epidemic. Thank goodness Norton is finding worthy roles of late.

It is to Schreiber's great credit, as well as that of writer Ray Nyswaner, that I could easily see how and why Kitty was seduced by Charlie. I don't know that there is a person alive who wouldn't have felt a thing had s/he been on the receiving end of his description of the opera. Charlie's a rake, to be sure, but Schreiber makes him more of a character than an archetype. Too bad we see so little of him.

When I found myself thrown by just how terribly the Fanes would treat each other, I thought to myself, "Who is this guy?" The guy in question being director John Curran. How does he present two characters that make me want to yell, "Stop being dicks!" with just enough compassion to make me care about what happens to them? Then I realized he has already done it to me. Is this some sort of a genre I had been previously unaware of? The angry married couple in midst of a crisis genre? Curran might be its master at only two pictures. It was hard to know for whom to feel worse.

As inevitable as the conclusion is (it is based on a W. Somerset Maugham novel, after all), you are still touched by the circumstances that brought us there. The coda fell mostly on the unnecessary side. Fortunately, not enough so to write off the film entirely. A character study above all, the film is a deeply etched portrait of romance, betrayal, and love. A-

*For horseback riding. Get your minds out of the gutter. Okay, I also noticed that he has a cute butt. I'm only human.

Bonus: The sonnet from which we gain the title.

Nit-pick: I find it hard to believe that any woman, much less one of Kitty's breeding, would have been walking around with bare legs in that day and age.