The Painted Veil (review)
The most electrifiying moments onscreen in this sturdy, stolid historical melodrama occur between real-life offscreen couple Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber, onscreen as a pair of illicit English ex-pat lovers in 1920s China. They’re barely together, however, as it is their characters’ affair that launches the plot, prompting her bitter, jealous husband, a doctor (Edward Norton), to set off for a remote village in the grips of a cholera epidemic, and to blackmail his wife into accompanying him. Off they go, across beautiful landscapes as they wallow in their own estrangement and in the elegant repression of W. Somerset Maugham (the film is based on his novel of the same name), and discover each other for the first time while the little world they land in falls apart around them. Watts (King Kong) and Norton (The Illusionist) are extraordinary actors, and in fine form here, but they never click together, and so the passion they’re meant to be awakening in each other fails to ignite, no matter how much the film insists it does. We find ourselves wishing that Liev (The Omen) would swoop in, kick Edward’s ass, and spirit Naomi away back to Shanghai for some genuine down-and-dirty romance.
(Technorati tags: Painted Veil, Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Liev Schreiber)
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rated PG-13 for some mature sexual situations, partial nudity, disturbing images and brief drug content
official site | IMDB
comments
posted by john (January 17, 2007 11:54 PM)
interesting that most critics think it was norton & watts that had the chemistry but not watts & schreiber. YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE OF OVER 100 WHO HAS SAID OTHERWISE. she says she was very self-conscious about the love scene w/schreiber because she had never done a scene w/someone she had been intimate with & she thought people might think...is this the way they do it. on the other hand, she was very convincing w/laura harring (some thought watts must be a lesbian) & friends like sean, mark, & now edward. i guess they convinced you so well that you could not change course w/the rest of us. i think it was watts's best perf--better than mulholland dr & 21g (but not ellie parker).
charley was scum. kitty & walter grew--whether you allowed yourself to grow w/them or not. if isolation & cholera could not do it, what could?
posted by MaryAnn (January 18, 2007 8:51 AM)
I'm not sure why you're shouting at me. Why do you expect that all critics are going to agree on every film?
posted by candy (February 11, 2007 12:33 AM)
For all that the movie endeavors to show us, it is incredible that all you consider is the chemistry between actors. Oy.
posted by MaryAnn (February 12, 2007 6:07 AM)
Who says that all I consider?
posted by veil_fan (March 28, 2007 10:45 AM)
I agree with the other critics. It was Norton and Watts who had the most palpable chemistry. The t sexual tension between these two was simply electric. The scenes where they're suppose to hate each other crackled with intensity, and in the scenes where they display desire and affection were so moving. Watts and Schreiber, in comparison, were so flat in their scenes together.