The Painted Veil

Post Reply
dws1982
Emeritus
Posts: 3791
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 9:28 pm
Location: AL
Contact:

Post by dws1982 »

I guess I'll take the vocal detractor role here. I thought it was dull and lifeless--one of those movies where you know exactly where it's going, and you know there's no point where it might jump the tracks and go off in a completely unanticipated direction. I don't know what exactly I wanted--just a few lightning bolts of inspiration, I suppose. To me the leads were exasperating from the start, and it just became tiresome after the tenth Scene Of Marital Discontent, or the dozenth scene of Norton looking photogenic at the river bank and Watts looking out of place in Rural China. And then by the time Norton and Watts quit hating each other, the movie was dead, and I was completely disconnected from it. Solid tech work though.
Mister Tee
Tenured Laureate
Posts: 8637
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 2:57 pm
Location: NYC
Contact:

Post by Mister Tee »

I'm way behind the pack on this movie; I finally caught up to it this weekend.

It's not being pejorative to say this would have been a strong contender for best picture of 1966. The combination of intense love story with sweeping historic context was a staple of films in the early/mid-60s; back then, such films were widely considered the pinnacle of screen achievement (love for the genre even persisted into the Out of Africa era). The grittier films of the late 60s/70s soon made such efforts seem outmoded (and I have to admit I wasn't all that sad to see them go)...but an exceptional example of anything is worth noting, and I think The Painted Veil is a superior work in the now-distant genre. (And, by the way, it's rather amazing it was done on a lean budget; those 60s efforts were consistently among the year's most expensive efforts)

What distinguishes the film from the start (apart from the predictable visual splendor) is the literacy of the dialogue and the quality of the acting. In very brief scenes, the film sets up a headed-for-disaster marriage that the characters seem powerless to avoid. We're certain that horrors await in China. It's at this point that -- I think Penelope is right -- the film sags just a tad...or, maybe better, the story seems just about played out, with an hour or so's running time still remaining. But, surprisingly, it's then that the film really takes off. The epidemic/political conflicts come into focus, but even more striking is the limning of the Watts/Norton relationship. The later scenes between the two are especially well-written and acted; what might seem a dubious narrative arc toward reconciliation and renewal feels wholly believable. At the same time, the story reaches to a satisfying movie-movie conclusion.

The whole cast is good: Schrieber in his brief appearance; Diana Rigg in limited duty; Toby Jones showing his Capote really WAS acting; and Norton, solid if less flashy than usual. But I think the film belongs to Watts. It's rare nowadays for a (seemingly) mainstream film to be centered around a female character, but that's what we've got here, and Watts is fully up to the task. When Norton refers to her as spoiled, I found myself thinking, Damn, I guess that would describe her, but I wouldn't have put it in those terms myself, because Watts had so well conveyed the constriction and frustration that were driving her actions. It's seems a cruelty of fate that such a full-bodied female perfomance should come along in a year when all the best actress slots were already spoken for. (It was no doubt a bad idea to open unheralded in December; it gave Watts the burden of crashing an already-set field) I don't know who of the field of five I'd eliminate, but I'd certainly want Watts in on the discussion. (As for '05, she'd have had my vote for the win)
Big Magilla
Site Admin
Posts: 19319
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 3:22 pm
Location: Jersey Shore

Post by Big Magilla »

Having re-watched this again on DVD, I'm struck senseless by the fact that only the LAFC and HFPA, among awards givers, appreciated Alexandre Desplat's score, rightfully naming it the the best of the year. Even the OFTAs passed it over in favor of the treacly Babel.

Interestingly, the film's principal stars and director are now busy with other re-makes. Naomi Watts has completed Michael Haneke's remake of his own Funny Games and is rumored to have accepted the Tippi Hedren role in a non-Hitchcock version of The Birds. Edward Norton will do yet another version of The Incredible Hulk for French director Louis Letterier (The Transporter), hopefully erasing all memories of the Ang Lee-Eric Bana disaster.

John Curran is scheduled to direct yet another version of Mary, Queen of Scots with Scarlett Johannsen planning to fill the shoes of Katharine Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave. Good luck!
The Original BJ
Emeritus
Posts: 4312
Joined: Mon Apr 28, 2003 8:49 pm

Post by The Original BJ »

Alexandre Desplat is one of the most exciting new film composers around. His scores to Girl With a Pearl Earring and Syriana were very memorable; his work on Birth is astonishing, and he was flat-out ROBBED of an Oscar in a fantastic year for film scores.

His one-two punch this year, with The Queen, and especially his gorgeous compositions for The Painted Veil, will hopefully net him his first, maybe first two, Oscar nominations.
Penelope
Site Admin
Posts: 5663
Joined: Sat Jan 31, 2004 11:47 am
Location: Tampa, FL, USA

Post by Penelope »

Saw The Painted Veil last night, and am quite pleased with it. It's a classically Hollywood epic, but done right: as some critics have pointed out, it IS one of the few book-to-film adaptations that actually improves upon its source (tho the middle section drags for about 15 minutes)--and I say that loving Maugham's novel--and containing all of the qualities of what used to be the big blockbusters of a bygone era--lush cinematography, stylish costume design, gorgeous art direction, solid but restrained direction, two top-tier stars sparking well with each other (Watts comes off slightly better, but both are very good), and, best of all, an absolutely ravishing music score by Alexandre Desplat--I could easily see him being nominated for BOTH The Queen and The Painted Veil, with the latter conceivably giving him the win--it's honestly that good.
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston

"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
Mister Tee
Tenured Laureate
Posts: 8637
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 2:57 pm
Location: NYC
Contact:

Post by Mister Tee »

Hollywood Reporter


The Painted Veil

Bottom Line: With steely precision, Naomi Watts and Edward Norton play a mismatched couple who can barely tolerate each other's company.By Kirk Honeycutt

Dec 14, 2006

"The Painted Veil" sets a few fine actors to work with one of W. Somerset Maugham's 1920s tales of Occidentals confronting the Far East and their own tangled emotional lives. With steely precision, Naomi Watts and Edward Norton play a mismatched couple who can barely tolerate each other's company. Meanwhile, Liev Schreiber and Toby Jones represent in finely detailed performances two very different kinds of British colonialists in China. Crucially, screenwriter Ron Nyswaner has added a political dimension absent from Maugham's novel that gives the melodrama more complicated and meatier themes.

The two leads and positive critical reaction will help sell "Painted Veil" in adult specialty venues. The film is unusual in that it is a co-production with the Chinese. Whatever difficulties this imposed on the Western filmmakers, the reward is a period film that feel authentic to its time and place.

A white man and woman arrive in a remote, wintery part of China. As they await the arrival of porters and sedan chairs to convey them to their final destination, the movie explains their unlikely presence in this far corner of the world with a few succinct flashbacks.

Kitty (Watts), an upper-class woman on the verge of spinsterhood, meets Dr. Walter Fane (Norton), a serious-minded bacteriologist, during a party at her parents' London home. The doctor falls instantly in love with her, but she is indifferent to him. Yet when he blurts out a marriage proposal, days before he is to return to his civil service post in Shanghai, a strange thing happens: She accepts, mostly to put as much distance as possible between her and a boring family life, especially her nagging, overbearing mother.
The mismatch is clear from the moment the couple arrives in Shanghai. Now bored in a new way, Kitty carelessly starts an affair with English Vice Consul Charlie Townsend (Schreiber). When Walter discovers his wife's adultery, he punishes them both by accepting a job as doctor in Mei-tan-fu, a remote village in the grip of a deadly cholera epidemic.

Things are, if anything, worse than imagined. The couple is not only surrounded by death, but all foreigners' lives are further endangered when news reaches the village that British troops killed large numbers of Chinese demonstrators in Shanghai.

Here lies the guts to the story, in which two people actually get to know each other under extreme circumstances and gain newfound respect and eventually love before a tragic end. In this process, three very different people become snarled in their lives.

Army Colonel Yu (Anthony Wong) is none too happy to see any Westerners in his corner of the world, but he helps Walter, albeit reluctantly, execute his ideas for relieving the conditions causing the cholera. The Mother Superior (Diana Rigg) of a French convent lets the lonely housewife work with the youngsters the convent has taken in during the epidemic. In this way, Kitty slowly comes to realize what her husband is up against.

But the key person is Deputy Commissioner Waddington (Jones), who at first seems like a burnt-out case gone native with a Chinese mistress and fondness for opium. But with further contact, he proves a kind and resilient man who is a model of compassion, which both Walter and Kitty so sadly lack.

The story suffers from predictability, about which there is little director John Curran or Nyswaner can do. This is somewhat offset by highlighting the East-West conflict, in which cultural and historical imperatives cause Westerners not to understand why the Chinese are so resistant to an "aid" that comes with so many conditions attached.

Watts' Kitty is a very modern woman for 1925. While her highbrow high jinks may remind you of Lucy Tantamount in Aldous Huxley's 1928 novel "Point Counterpoint," the difference is that China throws everything in sharp relief: her boredom, fear of the unknown and the spiritual emptiness of Western self-absorption.

By contrast, Norton's doctor is almost antediluvian. He is a man from another era in his relations with both women and foreigners. He suffers whenever he experiences disappointment with each, thereby falling into silent anger and self-loathing.

Schreiber, Jones and Rigg play characters who epitomize different aspects of the colonial experience in Asia. Each has an agenda and is only kidding him- or herself that the goals are selfless and apolitical.

Curran marshals his resources well in a country notoriously difficult for foreign filmmakers. Cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh and designer Tu Juhua perform magic in Guangxi Province, the 800-year-old town of Huang Yao and soundstages in Beijing, as they beautifully capture this strange land that intrigues and baffles its foreign visitors.
Reza
Laureate Emeritus
Posts: 10031
Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2003 11:14 am
Location: Islamabad, Pakistan

Post by Reza »

NY Times December 10, 2006

Another Encore for the Most Adaptable of Authors

By CHARLES McGRATH

IF there were a prize for authors who have had the most movies made from their work, W. Somerset Maugham would be at or near the top of the list. Jeffrey Meyers, Maugham’s latest biographer, counts 48 Maugham-based movies, and that’s not including made-for-TV movies or foreign films, in which case the total runs into the hundreds. Maugham himself felt, grudgingly, that he was better known for the film adaptations of his books than for the books themselves.

Maugham, who died in 1965 at 91, enjoyed an extremely long and productive career, which is a good start for a writer hoping to rack up his kind of stats; nor does it hurt that so many of his works were filmed more than once. “Of Human Bondage” was famously made into a movie three times: in 1934, with Leslie Howard and Bette Davis, in the role that jump-started her career; in 1946, with Paul Henreid and Eleanor Parker; and in 1964, with Laurence Harvey and Kim Novak. So was “Rain,” probably Maugham’s most famous short story: in 1928, with Gloria Swanson and Lionel Barrymore; in 1932, with Joan Crawford and Walter Huston; and in 1953, with Rita Hayworth and José Ferrer.

The latest Maugham film, a new version of “The Painted Veil” starring Edward Norton, Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber, which opens Dec. 20, will make that less-known property a three-timer as well, pushing it ahead of “The Razor’s Edge” and “The Letter,” which were each filmed only twice.

The original “Letter” (1940), starring Bette Davis again, is probably the best of the Maugham movies. On the other hand, the 1946 “Razor’s Edge,” with Gene Tierney and Tyrone Power, was pretty bad, despite an Oscar-winning performance by Anne Baxter as the alcoholic Sophie; the 1984 remake, starring Bill Murray in what amounts to a vanity production, was worse.

And the track record for “The Painted Veil” isn’t much better. The second version, renamed “The Seventh Sin,” came out in 1957 and sank like a stone. The 1934 original, a hard-to-find vehicle for Greta Garbo, is worth looking at for Garbo alone, but it’s a period piece and takes some very strange liberties with the book.

Both Mr. Norton and Ron Nyswaner, who wrote the screenplay for the new “Painted Veil” (and who is best known as the screenwriter of “Philadelphia”), say they have never seen it. Ms. Watts and John Curran, the director of the new film, each dug up copies, however, and took them along while shooting in China.

“I’d call Naomi and tease her, ‘Are you watching it?’ ” Mr. Curran recalled recently. “And she’d say, ‘No, I watched for 10 minutes, and that’s all I could stand.’ ” He added: “It’s almost unwatchable ­ a dull melodrama, all shot in the studio. I remember thinking, ‘Well, whatever happens, at least I’ll make a better movie than that.’ ”

Lytton Strachey once said that “The Painted Veil,” which was published in 1925, was a novel at the top of the second rank, and the same could be said of most of Maugham’s work. He was a novelist of a sort that scarcely exists anymore: a serious, highbrow (or highish-brow) entertainer, who for a while was even more successful as a playwright than as a novelist.

Maugham was a knowing and worldly storyteller, interested above all in characters and in the texture of their social relations, but he was also fascinated by people who were ready to renounce the world in quest of something better. The formula made him a great popular success, earning him a fortune, but he also managed his career so adroitly that he became a kind of brand name for classiness and elegance. His persona so appealed to Hollywood that for a series of anthology films in the late 1940s and early 1950s he appeared as himself, sleek and lizardlike, smoking a cigarette and introducing his own work.

“The Painted Veil” is the story of Walter and Kitty Fane: a priggish British bacteriologist and the frivolous social climber who marries him in a moment of desperation, convinced that she’s let all the better catches slip through her grasp. The couple move to Hong Kong, where Walter has been posted, and Kitty, bored and sexually frustrated, quickly embarks on an affair with a sweet-talker from the British consulate (Mr. Schreiber). When Walter finds out, he forces her into a kind of mutual suicide pact: she has to accompany him to a remote Chinese village where a cholera epidemic is raging, and there, though this is hardly what her husband intended, she discovers a larger purpose to her life.

“The Painted Veil” is shorter and more constricted than the novels for which Maugham is better known, “Of Human Bondage” especially, but it contains most of the ingredients that have made him such an attractive source for moviemakers. It’s smart and different, and like so much of Maugham it’s set in an exotic locale. (He is more famous now for writing about the South Seas, but he was one of the first modern British writers to visit China.) It’s sexy, opening with a scene of Kitty and her lover in bed together and giving them another near the end, when Kitty, at least partly redeemed and no longer in love with him, nevertheless yields to lust and loneliness. And the novel introduces a cast of strong and striking characters, very clearly delineated: not just Walter and Kitty but a number of supporting figures, including the caddish lover; Kitty’s appalling, ambitious mother; and Waddington (played in the new film by Toby Jones), a kindly Brit who has gone part native and has a secret Chinese mistress.

Maugham’s characters are so vivid, so starkly drawn, that they sometimes seem one-dimensional ­ not that this has troubled most moviemakers. This is the case in “Rain,” for example, with Sadie Thompson, the blowzy, big-hearted prostitute, and Alfred Davidson, the uptight missionary; in both the story and its several movie versions theirs is a clash of the single-minded. And it’s equally true of Walter Fane. Perhaps because Maugham modeled him on his older brother, Frederic, a cold, fussy and self-righteous lawyer who couldn’t accept Maugham’s homosexuality, Walter, in the novel at least, is so rigid and unforgiving as to seem almost inhuman.

The book stumbles in other ways as well, failing to develop, for example, the symbolic potential of the epidemic, which it barely describes, just as, for that matter, it mostly fails to describe China itself. The story takes place largely inside the heads of Walter and Kitty.

All these limitations the new “Painted Veil” turns into opportunities, so that it’s one of those rare Hollywood movies that are actually better than the books that inspired them. “I like to think that we didn’t change the book so much as liberate it,” Mr. Norton said in a recent interview. “We just imagined it on a slightly bigger scale, and made external some of what is internal in the novel.”

Maugham is not quite the hot property that he used to be, however, and making the movie took forever. Mr. Norton, who is also a producer of “The Painted Veil,” got involved with the project back in 1999. The script had already been bouncing around for a few years, shepherded by the producer Sara Colleton, and was going through almost countless drafts. There were strictly faithful versions, versions that took more liberties with the novel, and at one point even a feminist version.

It was Mr. Norton’s idea to enhance the role of Walter and include an element of redemption and forgiveness: in the movie, unlike the book, he eventually makes his peace with Kitty, and the two even fall in love. He almost literally melts before the viewer’s eye. It’s a development so natural, so in keeping with the book’s larger theme of transcendence, that you wonder why Maugham didn’t think of it.

“The novel is almost unremittingly bleak,” Mr. Norton said. “And the reason is I think Maugham had a pretty dim view of the potential of British colonials to change. But I went on the assumption that if you were willing to allow Walter and Kitty to grow, then you had the potential for a love story that was both tragic and meaningful.”

Mr. Nyswaner, the screenwriter, said: “Edward had this running joke with me that we couldn’t make a movie in which he was off screen all the time. But he was right ­ you have to have scenes for the male star. This was a case where the conventions of moviemaking actually helped.”

It was also Mr. Norton’s idea to enlist Ms. Watts for the part of Kitty, and that proved to be the deal clincher, but only after Ms. Watts became a bankable star with “Mulholland Drive” and “21 Grams.” She in turn suggested Mr. Curran, who had directed her in “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” (2004), a tale of two disintegrating marriages. That movie convinced both Mr. Norton and Ms. Watts that he had a knack for depicting dysfunctional relationships, but as it turned out, he made an even greater contribution to “The Painted Veil”: he helped make China not just a backdrop to the story, as it is in the novel, but an essential part of it.

That the movie would be shot on location in China was a given almost from the beginning. “There is no way I was going to make a movie that looked as if it had been shot in Canada,” Mr. Curran said. And instead of just building a set for the cholera-stricken village, he held out for an actual piece of unspoiled Chinese landscape, not an easy thing to find these days.

“Even the Chinese crew members were amazed at the place we found, Huang Yao,” he said. “It was like going back in time.”

It was also Mr. Curran’s idea to set the film specifically amid the events of 1925, when the Chinese nationalist movement was just beginning, and Mr. Norton, who had studied Chinese history at Yale, immediately agreed. He even worked with Mr. Curran and Mr. Nyswaner to add some scenes based on Jonathan D. Spence’s book “To Change China,” about the often bumbling efforts of Western advisers there.

“We’ve let Walter become the proxy for the arrogance of Western rationalism,” Mr. Norton explained, talking about how Walter is baffled when the Chinese are insufficiently grateful for his help in fighting cholera. “Walter means well, but he’s the folly of empire, and that adds a whole new dimension to what happens in the story. It’s a metaphor for the way empires get crushed.”

Mr. Nyswaner said: “Edward became passionate about the film. I tend toward despair, but he has this dogged optimism, and it’s because of him that the film ever got made.”

A movie about a love affair and a cholera epidemic in China in the ’20s is “such an unlikely project when you think of it,” Mr. Curran said. “Imagine the hurdles of getting it set up ­ all those executives looking with glazed eyes.”

Mr. Nyswaner said: “At least 50 percent of our energy went into negotiations and fending off powerful people’s suggestions. We even got notes from the Chinese government. In the script there was a prose description of some mountains as gloomy, and the government said, ‘We don’t have gloomy mountains here ­ our mountains are joyous.’ ”
User avatar
Sonic Youth
Tenured Laureate
Posts: 8003
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 8:35 pm
Location: USA

Post by Sonic Youth »

Variety gives it a moderate thumbs down.

The Painted Veil
(U.S.-China)
By TODD MCCARTHY
Variety


Intelligent scripting, solid thesping and eye-catching location shooting aren't enough to make a compelling modern film of "The Painted Veil," W. Somerset Maugham's yarn about Brits run amok in 1920s China. Well appointed in all respects, this story of a shallow adulteress's gradual discovery of her starchy husband's worth while battling a cholera epidemic in a backwater village feels remote and old-school despite a frankness the two previous film versions lacked. Cast and some mainstream critical support could launch the Warner Independent release to a respectable commercial life.

Maugham's novel, one of his numerous works about Westerners come to grief in the Far East, was published in 1925. MGM's dim 1934 adaptation, starring Greta Garbo and directed by Richard Boleslavsky, deviated madly from the book, while the studio's 1957 remake, "The Seventh Sin," with Eleanor Parker under Ronald Neame's direction, steered closer to its source but still couldn't engage certain core issues.

Present scripter Ron Nyswaner makes some solid fundamental decisions, beginning with the telescoping down to the barest minimum the London-set opening, in which pretty but undistinguished middle-class flirt Kitty (Naomi Watts) meets and quickly marries serious-minded bacteriologist Walter Fane (Edward Norton) and sets out with him to his posting in Shanghai.

Not remotely in love with her husband, Kitty quickly launches into a passionate affair with the smooth and married British vice consul Charlie Townsend (Liev Schreiber), a relationship Kitty takes far too seriously. When Walter finds out, he punishes his wife by maneuvering her into joining him on a mission to a rural area suffering from an unchecked cholera outbreak, a journey that can be interpreted as a quasi-joint suicide.

Arriving in Mei-tan-fu after days of being carried in chairs (the heat and humidity of the verdant, mountainous region is palpable), Walter all but ignores his guilty wife while he goes about his medical research. Kitty is lucky for the companionship of the local British deputy commissioner, Waddington (Toby Jones), one of those droll, dissolute and seedy representatives of distant empire who through the decades enlivened a stream of books from Conrad and Maugham to Waugh and Greene.

In due course, Kitty's self-centered horizons are enlarged through exposure to the good works of a Mother Superior (Diana Rigg) and a gaggle of French nuns working to help the locals. Kitty also finds she is pregnant, and the way she and Walter deal with the issue of the child's uncertain paternity provides an interesting breakthrough of their stony stalemate, something the previous film versions were forced to avoid due to conventions of the time.

Maugham focused exclusively on the vicissitudes of the colonials, who presumed they were bringing help, enlightenment and civilization to the citizens of an unruly land he portrayed strictly as a backdrop. Nyswaner, director John Curran and Norton, also aboard as one of the producers and prime movers of the project, have made a point of turning China into more of a character in the piece. This they do in part by bringing to the fore the nationalist, anti-English politics of the time, a movement spurred by a real-life British military massacre of Chinese demonstrators in 1925. Angry peasants combined with the cholera make for a volatile cocktail.

All the same, the film is still dominated by the stuffy, repressed personality of Fane, whose emotional stonewalling of his wife produces a stifling of Kitty's naturally more vivacious, if common, personality. Despite the extremes of human experience on view, there is a certain blandness to them as they play out, a sensation matched by the eye-catching but picture-postcard-like presentation of the settings (rural scenes were shot in Guangxi province in southern China).

Even the ultra-capable Norton and Watts aren't fully able to galvanize viewer interest in their narrowly self-absorbed characters. Norton puts on a thin, reedy voice to help express Walter's insecurity and sexual unassertiveness, all the better to contrast with his resolve once faced with dramatic decisions down the line. Watts holds down the story's emotional center, but still finds herself more limited in expression than usual, perhaps from the character's own limitations.

For his part, Jones, who played Truman Capote in "Infamous," seems to have stepped right out of the pages of the novel as the cheerfully jaded civil servant who enjoys illicit delights with his indulgent Chinese concubine. Schreiber overcomes initial suspicion over his casting as a presumptuous, entitled Brit envoy to deliver the requisite confident manliness to awaken Kitty. Rigg's wise, self-sacrificing Mother Superior is a far cry from Emma Peel, indeed.

Pic is a pleasure to look at and listen to, thanks to a fine, supple score from Alexandre Desplat.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Mister Tee
Tenured Laureate
Posts: 8637
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 2:57 pm
Location: NYC
Contact:

Post by Mister Tee »

Screendaily really likes it.


The Painted Veil

Steven Rosen in Los Angeles 15 December 2006

Dir: John Curran. US-Chi. 2006. 125mins.

Adapted from W Somerset Maugham’s novel about an idealistic newlywed British couple living in turbulent 1920s China, John Curran’s The Painted Veil is a palpably alive and heart-rending romantic drama about the extremes - geographic, sexual and emotional - travelled in a struggling marriage. Far more than an attractive literary period-piece, it is successful both in how it establishes a sense of time and place and the fine performances it draws from its two leads, Edward Norton and Naomi Watts.

Norton, screenwriter Ron Nyswaner and producer Sara Colleton are to be applauded for championing this project for so many years: the result is a work that has a resonating modern vitality while keeping its characters true to their era

In the US, when it opens on Dec 15, it is likely to play as not-so-veiled upscale holiday-season romantic-drama, finding a particular audience with female crowds. Box office is likely to be along the lines of Neil Jordan's 1999 feature The End Of The Affair (US: $10.8m): it should certainly do better in North America than the last Maugham adaptation, Being Julia (2004, US: $7.7m), simply because the story is more satisfying. Awards profile could push it even higher, although it is too modest a production to approach the $128m worldwide that Sydney Pollack's Oscar-winner Out Of Africa (1985) did more than two decades ago.

Overseas, where The End Of The Affair drew more than half its takings, it should also find attention among upscale audiences. It will be interesting to watch how The Painted Veil, which is shot primarily in English with some Mandarin, plays in China. Shot in southern China's mountainous Guangxi Province, where it can be released as a homegrown feature (it is a co-production with the China Film Bureau), it treats Chinese history with respect and features several Chinese name cast.

The film begins with the quick courtship and somewhat passionless marriage between Kitty (Watts), a mildly libertine upper-class woman whose parents find her selfish; and Walter (Norton), a shy biologist who works in China but has returned to England.

When they return to Shanghai, Walter discovers she is having an affair with a British vice consul (Schreiber) and forces her to accompany him to a cholera-ravaged remote village to suffer alone while he tries to contain the epidemic. But slowly, they start to see the goodness in each other.

Director John Curran (We Don't Live Here Anymore) and screenwriter Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia) keep the story balanced between telling, sometimes-searching, conversations that have the power of revelation and the more old-fashioned plot points.

Some of the bigger scenes seem under-resourced however: the mob scenes involving Chinese extras seem underwhelming and flimsy, especially when it comes to a march by rural cholera victims into the frightened village (although the historical details about the outbreak and the politically restive Chinese community are involving).

Naomi Watts has something to live up to, given that Greta Garbo played Kitty in the 1934 screen adaptation. But her performance is superb; initially a subtle but never condemnatory rendition of a vain woman, it grows more powerful with each scene as Kitty starts to change. It's so good that the audience never realises that until almost the end that the film is about Kitty's changes.

Edward Norton, too, is fine and maintains a convincing accent throughout, mixing sternness with warmth. Diana Rigg is outstanding as a nun in charge of a Catholic school who confides her religious disillusionment to Kitty.

Cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh excels at front-lighting close-ups with a warm, subdued yellow glow, and his shots of the region's misty valleys and lakes are gorgeously meditative. The tastefully orchestrated score by Alexander Desplat straddles major and minor melodies and is enriched by gentle solo piano work from Lang Lang.
Big Magilla
Site Admin
Posts: 19319
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 3:22 pm
Location: Jersey Shore

Post by Big Magilla »

Damien wrote:Herbert Marshall and George Brent dull? Blasphemy. I love both of them. Symbols of a time when Hollywood leading men had class.
They were dull in this.
Penelope
Site Admin
Posts: 5663
Joined: Sat Jan 31, 2004 11:47 am
Location: Tampa, FL, USA

Post by Penelope »

Big Magilla wrote:I don't know what's so obscure about the 1934 version of The Painted Veil. I've seen it, and I know Penelope has. It has long been available on video.
Actually, I haven't; I've read the novel, one of my favorites, but despite the availability on VHS and appearances on TCM, I've somehow managed to miss it all these years.

I agree this article is too harsh on The Razor's Edge; it's a fine film, though I've always preferred Gene Tierney's marvelous performance (the telephone scene is classic) over Anne Baxter's Oscar-winning Supporting turn.

My initial gut reaction was that this remake of The Painted Veil would die a fast death due to critical and audience dismissal, but it appears that, at least with the former, it's turned out to be pretty good...we shall see...my gut reaction has been off all year with what movies would succeed with critics and audiences....
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston

"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
Damien
Laureate
Posts: 6331
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 8:43 pm
Location: New York, New York
Contact:

Post by Damien »

Herbert Marshall and George Brent dull? Blasphemy. I love both of them. Symbols of a time when Hollywood leading men had class.
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
Big Magilla
Site Admin
Posts: 19319
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 3:22 pm
Location: Jersey Shore

Post by Big Magilla »

Who edited this?

The 1940 version of The Letter was not "the original". It was adapted from a play Maugham wrote for Gladys Cooper, not a novel. It was first filmed in 1929 earning Jeanne Eagels a posthumous Oscar nomination.

I don't know what's so obscure about the 1934 version of The Painted Veil. I've seen it, and I know Penelope has. It has long been available on video.

I like the 1946 version of The Razor's Edge. I think Tyrone Power's earnest acting style was perfect for the lead and the supporting performances of Clifton Webb and Anne Baxter are superb even if Baxter's over-the-top acting style in it is no longer in vogue.

I liked the 1934 version of Of Human Bondage for the acting of Leslie Howard and Bette Davis, but the subsequent 1946 and 1964 versions are as much a chore to get through as the novel. Rain/Sadie Thompson has always seemed one-dimensional to me despite the acting opportunties it has always afforded its stars.

The new version of The Painted Veil does sound like it's worth seeing despite my early misgivings. I can't imagine Naomi Watts improving upon the divine Garbo but besting dull Herbert Marshall and George Brent should be an easy task for Edward Norton and Liev Schreiber.
Okri
Tenured
Posts: 3345
Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 3:28 pm
Location: Edmonton, AB

Post by Okri »

I liked The Razor's Edge (with Power and Tierney).
Penelope
Site Admin
Posts: 5663
Joined: Sat Jan 31, 2004 11:47 am
Location: Tampa, FL, USA

Post by Penelope »

No important reviews yet, but an interesting article from the New York Times--warning, MAJOR SPOILERS:

Another Encore for the Most Adaptable of Authors
By CHARLES McGRATH

IF there were a prize for authors who have had the most movies made from their work, W. Somerset Maugham would be at or near the top of the list. Jeffrey Meyers, Maugham’s latest biographer, counts 48 Maugham-based movies, and that’s not including made-for-TV movies or foreign films, in which case the total runs into the hundreds. Maugham himself felt, grudgingly, that he was better known for the film adaptations of his books than for the books themselves.

Maugham, who died in 1965 at 91, enjoyed an extremely long and productive career, which is a good start for a writer hoping to rack up his kind of stats; nor does it hurt that so many of his works were filmed more than once. “Of Human Bondage” was famously made into a movie three times: in 1934, with Leslie Howard and Bette Davis, in the role that jump-started her career; in 1946, with Paul Henreid and Eleanor Parker; and in 1964, with Laurence Harvey and Kim Novak. So was “Rain,” probably Maugham’s most famous short story: in 1928, with Gloria Swanson and Lionel Barrymore; in 1932, with Joan Crawford and Walter Huston; and in 1953, with Rita Hayworth and José Ferrer.

The latest Maugham film, a new version of “The Painted Veil” starring Edward Norton, Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber, which opens Dec. 20, will make that less-known property a three-timer as well, pushing it ahead of “The Razor’s Edge” and “The Letter,” which were each filmed only twice.

The original “Letter” (1940), starring Bette Davis again, is probably the best of the Maugham movies. On the other hand, the 1946 “Razor’s Edge,” with Gene Tierney and Tyrone Power, was pretty bad, despite an Oscar-winning performance by Anne Baxter as the alcoholic Sophie; the 1984 remake, starring Bill Murray in what amounts to a vanity production, was worse.

And the track record for “The Painted Veil” isn’t much better. The second version, renamed “The Seventh Sin,” came out in 1957 and sank like a stone. The 1934 original, a hard-to-find vehicle for Greta Garbo, is worth looking at for Garbo alone, but it’s a period piece and takes some very strange liberties with the book.

Both Mr. Norton and Ron Nyswaner, who wrote the screenplay for the new “Painted Veil” (and who is best known as the screenwriter of “Philadelphia”), say they have never seen it. Ms. Watts and John Curran, the director of the new film, each dug up copies, however, and took them along while shooting in China.

“I’d call Naomi and tease her, ‘Are you watching it?’ ” Mr. Curran recalled recently. “And she’d say, ‘No, I watched for 10 minutes, and that’s all I could stand.’ ” He added: “It’s almost unwatchable — a dull melodrama, all shot in the studio. I remember thinking, ‘Well, whatever happens, at least I’ll make a better movie than that.’ ”

Lytton Strachey once said that “The Painted Veil,” which was published in 1925, was a novel at the top of the second rank, and the same could be said of most of Maugham’s work. He was a novelist of a sort that scarcely exists anymore: a serious, highbrow (or highish-brow) entertainer, who for a while was even more successful as a playwright than as a novelist.

Maugham was a knowing and worldly storyteller, interested above all in characters and in the texture of their social relations, but he was also fascinated by people who were ready to renounce the world in quest of something better. The formula made him a great popular success, earning him a fortune, but he also managed his career so adroitly that he became a kind of brand name for classiness and elegance. His persona so appealed to Hollywood that for a series of anthology films in the late 1940s and early 1950s he appeared as himself, sleek and lizardlike, smoking a cigarette and introducing his own work.

“The Painted Veil” is the story of Walter and Kitty Fane: a priggish British bacteriologist and the frivolous social climber who marries him in a moment of desperation, convinced that she’s let all the better catches slip through her grasp. The couple move to Hong Kong, where Walter has been posted, and Kitty, bored and sexually frustrated, quickly embarks on an affair with a sweet-talker from the British consulate (Mr. Schreiber). When Walter finds out, he forces her into a kind of mutual suicide pact: she has to accompany him to a remote Chinese village where a cholera epidemic is raging, and there, though this is hardly what her husband intended, she discovers a larger purpose to her life.

“The Painted Veil” is shorter and more constricted than the novels for which Maugham is better known, “Of Human Bondage” especially, but it contains most of the ingredients that have made him such an attractive source for moviemakers. It’s smart and different, and like so much of Maugham it’s set in an exotic locale. (He is more famous now for writing about the South Seas, but he was one of the first modern British writers to visit China.) It’s sexy, opening with a scene of Kitty and her lover in bed together and giving them another near the end, when Kitty, at least partly redeemed and no longer in love with him, nevertheless yields to lust and loneliness. And the novel introduces a cast of strong and striking characters, very clearly delineated: not just Walter and Kitty but a number of supporting figures, including the caddish lover; Kitty’s appalling, ambitious mother; and Waddington (played in the new film by Toby Jones), a kindly Brit who has gone part native and has a secret Chinese mistress.

Maugham’s characters are so vivid, so starkly drawn, that they sometimes seem one-dimensional — not that this has troubled most moviemakers. This is the case in “Rain,” for example, with Sadie Thompson, the blowzy, big-hearted prostitute, and Alfred Davidson, the uptight missionary; in both the story and its several movie versions theirs is a clash of the single-minded. And it’s equally true of Walter Fane. Perhaps because Maugham modeled him on his older brother, Frederic, a cold, fussy and self-righteous lawyer who couldn’t accept Maugham’s homosexuality, Walter, in the novel at least, is so rigid and unforgiving as to seem almost inhuman.

The book stumbles in other ways as well, failing to develop, for example, the symbolic potential of the epidemic, which it barely describes, just as, for that matter, it mostly fails to describe China itself. The story takes place largely inside the heads of Walter and Kitty.

All these limitations the new “Painted Veil” turns into opportunities, so that it’s one of those rare Hollywood movies that are actually better than the books that inspired them. “I like to think that we didn’t change the book so much as liberate it,” Mr. Norton said in a recent interview. “We just imagined it on a slightly bigger scale, and made external some of what is internal in the novel.”

Maugham is not quite the hot property that he used to be, however, and making the movie took forever. Mr. Norton, who is also a producer of “The Painted Veil,” got involved with the project back in 1999. The script had already been bouncing around for a few years, shepherded by the producer Sara Colleton, and was going through almost countless drafts. There were strictly faithful versions, versions that took more liberties with the novel, and at one point even a feminist version.

It was Mr. Norton’s idea to enhance the role of Walter and include an element of redemption and forgiveness: in the movie, unlike the book, he eventually makes his peace with Kitty, and the two even fall in love. He almost literally melts before the viewer’s eye. It’s a development so natural, so in keeping with the book’s larger theme of transcendence, that you wonder why Maugham didn’t think of it.

“The novel is almost unremittingly bleak,” Mr. Norton said. “And the reason is I think Maugham had a pretty dim view of the potential of British colonials to change. But I went on the assumption that if you were willing to allow Walter and Kitty to grow, then you had the potential for a love story that was both tragic and meaningful.”

Mr. Nyswaner, the screenwriter, said: “Edward had this running joke with me that we couldn’t make a movie in which he was off screen all the time. But he was right — you have to have scenes for the male star. This was a case where the conventions of moviemaking actually helped.”

It was also Mr. Norton’s idea to enlist Ms. Watts for the part of Kitty, and that proved to be the deal clincher, but only after Ms. Watts became a bankable star with “Mulholland Drive” and “21 Grams.” She in turn suggested Mr. Curran, who had directed her in “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” (2004), a tale of two disintegrating marriages. That movie convinced both Mr. Norton and Ms. Watts that he had a knack for depicting dysfunctional relationships, but as it turned out, he made an even greater contribution to “The Painted Veil”: he helped make China not just a backdrop to the story, as it is in the novel, but an essential part of it.

That the movie would be shot on location in China was a given almost from the beginning. “There is no way I was going to make a movie that looked as if it had been shot in Canada,” Mr. Curran said. And instead of just building a set for the cholera-stricken village, he held out for an actual piece of unspoiled Chinese landscape, not an easy thing to find these days.

“Even the Chinese crew members were amazed at the place we found, Huang Yao,” he said. “It was like going back in time.”

It was also Mr. Curran’s idea to set the film specifically amid the events of 1925, when the Chinese nationalist movement was just beginning, and Mr. Norton, who had studied Chinese history at Yale, immediately agreed. He even worked with Mr. Curran and Mr. Nyswaner to add some scenes based on Jonathan D. Spence’s book “To Change China,” about the often bumbling efforts of Western advisers there.

“We’ve let Walter become the proxy for the arrogance of Western rationalism,” Mr. Norton explained, talking about how Walter is baffled when the Chinese are insufficiently grateful for his help in fighting cholera. “Walter means well, but he’s the folly of empire, and that adds a whole new dimension to what happens in the story. It’s a metaphor for the way empires get crushed.”

Mr. Nyswaner said: “Edward became passionate about the film. I tend toward despair, but he has this dogged optimism, and it’s because of him that the film ever got made.”

A movie about a love affair and a cholera epidemic in China in the ’20s is “such an unlikely project when you think of it,” Mr. Curran said. “Imagine the hurdles of getting it set up — all those executives looking with glazed eyes.”

Mr. Nyswaner said: “At least 50 percent of our energy went into negotiations and fending off powerful people’s suggestions. We even got notes from the Chinese government. In the script there was a prose description of some mountains as gloomy, and the government said, ‘We don’t have gloomy mountains here — our mountains are joyous.’ ”
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston

"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
Post Reply

Return to “2000 - 2007”