The Painted Veil

Now, this one isn’t Oscar-nominated, I will confess. But it is Oscar-snubbed, and I think that qualifies it for a review.

It’s about this society girl (Naomi Watts) who cheats on her boring doctor husband (Edward Norton) with a married guy (Liev Schreiber), and when the husband finds out he takes her into the middle of a big cholera epidemic in rural China. He looks boring but he’s really ruthless. Oh, and I was lying about him being a doctor, he’s boringer than that, he’s a bacteriologist. Anyway, enduring all the hardship makes him less boring and her less frivolous, which brings them together, and since they’re in a cholera epidemic you can probably see where all this is going, but I won’t spoil it for you.

I actually really enjoyed the film, and it pains me to say anything bad about it because I love Edward Norton so, and I always want everything he’s in to be perfect. He’s very good in this with all the intensity and the below-the-surface anguish and the British sang-froid – though not, I regret to say, the British accent, which he is really just phoning in. Naomi Watts has a character arc and pulls off the period piece woman thing with aplomb; the supporting cast (Toby Jones as a kindly squished-face colonialist guy, Diana Rigg as a disenchanted nun) are wonderful; the cinematography showcases China’s beauty and sets it in sharp contrast with the cholera misery and wretchedness and corpses. All the elements were in favor, and this should have been a better film than it is.

One problem is that everything’s rather bloodless. I’m definitely not a fan of on-screen violence (I can’t even watch people getting shots), but the cholera, it just didn’t seem that bad. Apart from the occasional obligatory tragic corpse with blue feet poking pathetically out of shrouds, we didn’t see much of people being sick. This could have been one of those subtle things that works brilliantly, but it really wasn’t. Plus everyone kept setting up difficulties and then knocking them down very rapidly – like, the warlord didn’t want to help build a water-transferring thing, but then someone said “British army” to him and he caved instantly; or there was a big deal about this huge group of people coming into town and contaminating everything, but the next thing you know they’re safely camped outside of the town and it’s fine. While Walter and Kitty’s relationship works quite well, many of the other bits of the film wind up as background noise or obvious tools for uniting the wretched couple.

The moral of the story is that hardship brings people together but can also end up killing them so it is not the best fix for a shaky marriage. Also that China is pretty, and colonialism and armies make everything trickier. And I liked it, and a more gritty depiction of cholera would have made me sad, so I say go ahead and ignore the lacklustre-osity. Realism is overrated anyway.