The Painted Veil (2006)
I'm not sure any author has been adapted to film as much as Somerset Maugham, nor so many so well. (I include even such obvious shoe-ins as Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie.) And here is another that depends, and succeeds, on the basis of his writing. Maugham's novels and stories are often praised and criticized equally for their thinly evoked melodrama, for their lack of progressive Modernism. But they make great reading, and what perfect fodder for the movies!
Here we have what is gleaned from his own experiences--he started life briefly as a doctor, and later travelled widely in the old stomping grounds of the British Empire and beyond, including China where this is set. It is the mid-twenties, and so the set design and music are often richly tactile and moving. And the plot is about a British doctor, played by Edward Norton, who goes to the hinterlands of China to work on a cholera epidemic. He is a noble figure if a bitter one, and Norton plays it a little too close to the chest. Still, we get his dedication and withdrawn fortitude easily.
The bigger conflict and emotional involvement for the viewer is his wife, Kitty, played with unusual clarity by Naomi Watts. Maugham sets his romantic conflicts in interesting places without letting you forget that it's the interpersonal stuff that matters, not the cholera. Not really. Watts plays the misplaced and a bit lost-at-sea wife really well, though the movie keeps her, as with Norton, in check most of the time. Some will say it's the British reserve, the stiff upper lip, but that's only a public face. Here the director John Curran makes it complete, even behind closed doors.
Some will find this movie too careful, too slow, too pretty, too literate. And those are some reasons it works. It's a really fine film. It breaks no rules, it feels a bit old fashioned like many Merchant-Ivory films do, but like those, it sucks you into this other world and illuminates it as if from within. It may seem at times precious, or even a bit canned (some obvious things have to happen in an epidemic where some townspeople not to mention rustic warlords don't get modern science so well), but overall it makes well-proportioned dramatic sense.
This is a joint Chinese/British enterprise, and the filming is entirely in China, even the studio stuff. That might help account for the political delicacy of the whole enterprise, but it's a great collaboration and a good dip into one small piece of the complicated Chinese Twentieth Century.
I'm not sure any author has been adapted to film as much as Somerset Maugham, nor so many so well. (I include even such obvious shoe-ins as Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie.) And here is another that depends, and succeeds, on the basis of his writing. Maugham's novels and stories are often praised and criticized equally for their thinly evoked melodrama, for their lack of progressive Modernism. But they make great reading, and what perfect fodder for the movies!
Here we have what is gleaned from his own experiences--he started life briefly as a doctor, and later travelled widely in the old stomping grounds of the British Empire and beyond, including China where this is set. It is the mid-twenties, and so the set design and music are often richly tactile and moving. And the plot is about a British doctor, played by Edward Norton, who goes to the hinterlands of China to work on a cholera epidemic. He is a noble figure if a bitter one, and Norton plays it a little too close to the chest. Still, we get his dedication and withdrawn fortitude easily.
The bigger conflict and emotional involvement for the viewer is his wife, Kitty, played with unusual clarity by Naomi Watts. Maugham sets his romantic conflicts in interesting places without letting you forget that it's the interpersonal stuff that matters, not the cholera. Not really. Watts plays the misplaced and a bit lost-at-sea wife really well, though the movie keeps her, as with Norton, in check most of the time. Some will say it's the British reserve, the stiff upper lip, but that's only a public face. Here the director John Curran makes it complete, even behind closed doors.
Some will find this movie too careful, too slow, too pretty, too literate. And those are some reasons it works. It's a really fine film. It breaks no rules, it feels a bit old fashioned like many Merchant-Ivory films do, but like those, it sucks you into this other world and illuminates it as if from within. It may seem at times precious, or even a bit canned (some obvious things have to happen in an epidemic where some townspeople not to mention rustic warlords don't get modern science so well), but overall it makes well-proportioned dramatic sense.
This is a joint Chinese/British enterprise, and the filming is entirely in China, even the studio stuff. That might help account for the political delicacy of the whole enterprise, but it's a great collaboration and a good dip into one small piece of the complicated Chinese Twentieth Century.