I will mark The Painted Veil as the best movie I may have *never* seen. A friend and I talked about how much we each love (500 Days) of Summer, and she said I needed to see The Painted Veil, her second favorite movie. She and I have very similar tastes in pop culture, so I told her I would give it a chance. I remember seeing the preview back in 2006 and thinking it was just another typical romantic period piece that I would probably find boring. I was more than pleasantly surprised. This movie was incredible, and I’m so grateful my friend and I had the conversation we had, and she encouraged me to see it.
If one of your goals when seeing a movie is to escape to a story you might never otherwise know and be captivated by everything involved, you cannot do better than this movie. It is a period piece. Its trailer suggests that it’s a romance (I compare how I felt during the trailer to how I felt when seeing the trailers for movies like The English Patient and The End of the Affair), but it isn’t…at least not in the traditional sense. Instead, The Painted Veil is rich in its storytelling, and its two leads give performances that make you forget it is even Norton and Watts that you see on screen.
This movie takes place in 1925, China. Dr. Walter Fane (Norton) is a bacteriologist who has fallen for Kitty (Watts) during a visit to England. Kitty is the gorgeous daughter of a wealthy and well-known family. Kitty is getting older and is without a suitor. Though she doesn’t love him and barely even knows him (the courting process, though not said, seems to be just a matter of weeks), she agrees to marry Walter, more to get away from her overbearing mother than anything else. While Walter has strong feelings for Kitty, those feelings simply are not returned. Walter knows it early on, but he hopes that she will one day be able to develop a romantic connection with him. After the wedding, Walter and Kitty move back to their home in Shanghai. She is not happy with her new life. She has an affair with a man named Charlie Townsend (Liev Schreiber – Defiance, The Manchurian Candidate), the British Vice Consul. Kitty has it in her head that the pair are in love and that she will leave Walter, and Charlie will leave his wife. After Walter learns of his wife’s infidelity, he recklessly and, seemingly without much rationale, volunteers to travel to a disease-stricken village in China. The town is dealing with a significant Cholera epidemic and can’t get a doctor or anybody with the skillset to help deal with the problem to come there. He tells Kitty that she is either coming with him or that he will file for divorce on the grounds of adultery. Kitty’s decision is made for her after a visit with Charlie, where her lover reveals that he has no intention of leaving his wife for her.
Whether it is an altruistic move on Walter’s part to risk his health and safety by going to the village or if he is doing it merely to punish Kitty isn’t immediately known. The days are long and tiring and are made worse by the couple’s inability and unwillingness to communicate with one another. He still needs to find the answers he’s looking for. She is bored, miserable, and feels useless. They seem to have nothing to look forward to in their lives, both in the short and long term. What happens next is truly remarkable and is what filmmaking and storytelling are all about. If you’ve made it to this point in the movie, you are in for a real treat with what comes next as the two characters slowly but surely reveal sides of themselves that you didn’t think they had. Nothing ever feels forced, and nothing ever feels dragged out. It’s as great of a story and a development of characters that you will find in a long, long time.
Plot 10/10
Character Development 10/10
Character Chemistry 10/10
Acting 10/10 (two of the best performances of the year)
Screenplay 10/10
Directing 10/10
Cinematography 10/10 (sweeping)
Sound 10/10
Hook and Reel 10/10
Universal Relevance 10/10
100%
I made this trailer for the movie for fun.
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