Review: The Painted Veil
One of the two movies I went to see this year was the Painted Veil starring Edward Norton and Naomi Watts, actor and actress who I have a lot of respect for. The Painted Veil is a movie about love but it’s not one of those extraordinarily retarded movies we usually call “romantic comedy”. The movie is a drama and the tension is in the relationship between the two people (Norton and Watts’ characters). The love we’re talking about isn’t the type we’re used to seeing coming from Hollywood. Namely, this isn’t about a hot guy and a hot girl falling for each other where the tension is centered around some incredibly unrealistic and unlikely scenario, it gets resolved, and everyone lives happily ever after.
The Painted Veil is not that kind of movie because Naomi Watts is gorgeous but Edward Norton isn’t a guy who I would worry about stealing my girlfriend if I left them alone for 5 minutes. In fact, Norton’s character is precisely that kind of guy, superficially quite boring, reserved, and somewhat of a wuss. He’s the stereotypical bookworm. Girls don’t fall for those guys and neither does Watts’ character. He asks her to marry him after being secretly in love with her for two years and she agrees out of social pressure and perhaps impulsiveness. The movie starts out with a loveless marriage so you know it’s not funny and the romance is already over — well there was none to start with when the guy is a nerd.
I won’t ruin the rest of the movie for you but during the happier moments, love in this movie is more of Plato’s Symposium’s kind of love, where you discover the hidden strengths and virtues of a person. Notice that I said Norton’s character is superficially such and such. His character’s hidden strength are complemented by Watts’ appreciation for those strengths. It is when those strengths are displayed and observed that their love grows. Love brings with it redemption for both characters. Unfortunately, this movie is not the stupid happy type for many reasons. If I had to give it a second title, it would be “Love is a Bitch”.
Before we nerds go around celebrating that there is hope for us all, maybe we too can get ourselves a Naomi Watts, just remember that this movie is set against a Cholera infested village in the Chinese interior provinces in the 1920s. In other words, maybe some attractive lady would discover the hidden virtues in your, if you had any, but you have a chance in hell. It’s better to be showy, charming, but completely cowardly and without virtue underneath. That’s what gets the women nowadays and in the 1920s.
Ultimately the movie leaves us with a bit of a quandry. How does a virtuous person show those qualities without being showy and simply two-faced? How does someone who admires such things separate the real deals from the false heroes? Do people really even admire such things? The fact that the movie is set in such a rare setting puts all of that into doubt. Ordinarily, girls like Watts’ character will never love a guy like Norton’s character. Thus, on that level it is quite sad. The movie’s view on love then is quite cynical. Yet one can hope that in those brief movements and rare occurences when they do happen it becomes a love of a whole new level, one that we can be reasonably sure of surviving the 1 in 2 marriages will end divorce statistic we have going today with our Hollywood romantic comedy love.
I would give this movie a 5/5. It costed almost 20 million to make and at $10,000 per starving child saved, that works out to be 2,000 children died for the making of this movie. Guess what, it’s worth it to me!