The Painted Veil

Directed by John Curran

After the embarrassing spectacle of Naomi Watts juggling and tumbling for a CGI ape in Peter Jackson’s King Kong, the prospect of her starring in The Painted Veil, a romantic drama adapted from W. Somerset Maugham, promised to return Watts to her human-scale, emotionally-fraught specialty. But hopes are dashed in The Painted Veil’s very first scene where Watts sits opposite Edward Norton in the high mountain range of China; they stare at the vastness, looking past each other. It’s an image meant to depict a loveless marriage, but the estrangement between Watts and Norton is so frieze-like and attenuated, it almost resembles that overdrawn failure to communicate between Watts and the Big Ape.

There is indeed a communication breakdown in The Painted Veil. It’s located in the mis-fit between Watts’ emotional candor and the ceremonially structured storytelling of screenwriter Ron Nyswaner and director John Curran. As Kitty, the daughter of a middle class family in 1920s England, Watts’ restlessness outpaces the scenes of stultifying social custom. She’s far ahead of the pre-feminist constraints enforced by Kitty’s image-conscious mother and the sedate, dark-upholstered, Merchant-Ivory-like period details. When Kitty accepts a sudden marriage proposal from the young bacteriologist Walter Fane (Norton), the story is already in trouble. Watts sends a message about brash sexuality that makes the very formal plot seem chagrined.

Kitty and Walter’s marriage presents a story about how two adults awkwardly and painfully grow beyond their lack of experience; they develop sexual and moral principles of their own choosing, apart from social convention. The couple relocate to a remote village in China, where Walter continues his medical studies, hoping to cure a cholera epidemic. Part of Walter’s plan is vengeful; he wants to risk their lives to punish Kitty for having an affair in Shanghai with an English vice counsel (Liev Schreiber). But in the Maugham scheme, the exotic locale pushes the Westerners to confront themselves, changing their own precepts, opening up their sense of the world.

The Painted Veil goes from scenes of blatantly anxious, lustful behavior to situations where the characters are confused, non-communicative, psychologically lost. It doesn’t maintain the sexual self-possession of Von Sternberg’s exotic, China-set masterworks (Shanghai Express, The Shanghai Gesture). Curran and Nyswaner never fully unleash the feminine character of Watts’ Kitty. It’s all too apt when a nun (Diana Rigg) says Kitty looks frail and tired. All these years after Sternberg—and after the startlingly pragmatic portrait of a marriage between Pat O’Brien and Josephine Hutchinson in the 1935 Oil For the Lamps of China—contemporary filmmakers still struggle with how to convey sexual instinct while making prestige movies.

Prudery isn’t the problem (Curran and Nyswaner have previously made sexually frank movies). They just can’t hook-up Watts’ avidity to an expressive narrative. The Painted Veil fails largely because modern filmmakers have lost faith in how stories convey emotional longing and are powered by erotic impulses (the Sternberg secret). Maugham’s careful moral structure collapses with the nun’s nutty analogy about her marriage to God: “We’ve settled into a relationship of peaceful indifference.” No wonder this film’s sentimental ending feels like a crock.