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List Price: $27.95 | | Label: Warner Home Video
Salesrank: 2053
Released: May 8, 2007 |
| Our Price: $9.93 |
| Used Price: $7.96 |
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MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Based on the classic novel by W. Somerset Maugham "The Painted Veil" is a love story set in the 1920s that tells the story of a young English couple Walter a middle class doctor and Kitty an upper-class woman who get married for the wrong reasons and relocate to Shanghai where she falls in love with someone else. When he uncovers her infidelity in an act of vengeance he accepts a job in a remote village in China ravaged by a deadly epidemic and takes her along. Their journey brings meaning to their relationship and gives them purpose in one of the most remote and beautiful places on earth.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA UPC: 012569585577 Manufacturer No: 58557
Description of The Painted Veil:
Produced by Edward Norton and Naomi Watts, The Painted Veil works well as a movie--even better as an actor's showcase. The year is 1925. When her domineering mother pressures her to marry, Kitty (Watts) settles for shy bacteriologist Walter (Norton). Then Walter is transferred from London to Shanghai and the lonely and bored Kitty drifts into an affair with married diplomat Charlie (Liev Schreiber). When Walter finds out, he makes a startling proposition: either Kitty accompanies him to the cholera-infested countryside or he'll divorce her. With no other prospects, she comes along on what looks like a double-suicide mission. Based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil was adapted by Philadelphia's Ron Nyswaner (who knows a little something about infectious diseases). As two previous versions made little impact--despite Garbo's presence in the 1934 melodrama--John Curran's film is sure to stand as definitive. Interestingly, Norton, who studied Chinese history at Yale, chose Watts as his co-star, while Watts chose Curran, for whom she appeared in 2004's underrated We Don't Live Here Anymore. Filmed on location, the handsome production is, in many respects, just as old-fashioned as its source material--sex is merely suggested and Kitty is shocked that their English neighbor (Toby Jones) has a Chinese lover--but the ending packs a feminist twist. Mostly though, The Painted Veil is about the acting, and Watts and Norton, along with Diana Rigg as a disillusioned Mother Superior, have rarely been better. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
The Painted Veil Reviews:
wonderful movie 
2008-10-03 - This is a wonderful movie, I saw it in a theatrre, so when I sa it on Amazon, I decided to buy it, too bad it wasn't available in blu-ray. The images are great. The performances as well.
A Real Love Story
2008-08-31 - This is not my kind of movie. I caught a scene on the movie channel that pulled me in and had to see it. I called my movie buff friend and she was shocked I wanted to watch it. I'm a romantic comedy only movie watcher.
This made me love Ed Norton. The story is so true to life and the most beautiful love story I have ever seen. I purchased it and have watched it many times. I tell all my friends to watch it. The title is from a poem. I needed to know why it was named that. Makes sense now.
A loveless marriage and a Cholera epidemic in 1925 China
2008-08-29 - This 2006 film is the third movie adaptation of the 1925 novel by Somerset Maugham. The film brings us back to that time and place where Brits were considered the good guys when they moved to China and tried to help the people. It brought me right there too, being carried in a sedan chair, feeling the heat and the dust and the basic "foreignness" of China for the British characters.
Naomi Watts is cast in the role of a spoiled upper-class young woman who is pressured into marrying Edward Norton, a do-gooder British bacteriologist who lives in Shanghai and is looking for a bride. He plays the role as a well-meaning, but uptight and stuffy man without an ounce of romantic appeal. Not surprisingly, his bride is soon having an affair with Liev Schreiber, a businessman and diplomat married to a very socially prominent woman. When Norton finds out about the affair, he is furious, and, as Liev Schreiber has no intention of leaving his wife, Watts is forced to go with her husband to the interior of China where there is a raging Cholera epidemic.
Against the backdrop of this serious disease which is ravaging the countryside, this marriage is displayed with all its faults. Watts hates her husband who is doing his best to help the people who don't understand why he denies them their water supply or why he insists that the dead must be buried immediately. Norton works day and night to help the people, even creating an irrigation system and making peace with the local warlord. Watts starts to work in an orphanage run by nuns and she begins to soften towards her husband. Eventually, they fall in love and there seems to be happiness in spite of all the disease around them as well as lots of anti-British feelings. Then tragedy strikes.
I loved this film. I thought the acting was outstanding. I felt the reality of the China that Somerset Maugham described in 1925. And I really related to the story. This film did not get very good reviews when it came out. It was thought to be too old fashioned for a modern audience. To me, however, this film was first rate.
A beautiful, heartbreaking story of love and sacrifice
2008-08-07 - Breathtaking in its filming of rural China, this movie features two main characters that sear the screen: Naomi Watts and Ed Norton. Watts is "Kitty Fane" who has married to escape her mother and to best her sister by "getting the doctor." Bored to tears as a housewife, she has an affair with a notorious "ladies man" who is also married and she deludes herself that he loves her enough to divorce his wife.
Norton plays Walter, a research doctor who comes home early one day and catches an eyeful. He then makes Kitty a proposition: if her lover agrees to marry her, he will divorce her. If not, she must come with him to a corner of China where an epidemic of Cholera is raging and there is no doctor. Take it or leave it, he says. She takes it - very reluctantly.
I enjoy Somerset Maughm's stories, but this movie tops my list for its character portrayals and insights into human nature.
Screenplay? 
2008-08-01 - This beautifully produced motion picture should have worked. the cinematography, the talented cast, the music, the backdrops. And all of this is beautifully done. What is missing is life, elan. Some activity would have been nice. Once, the good doctor confronts his wife about her infidelity, nothing much takes place. Yes, there's a cholera epidemic in the midst of some of the most stunning scenery on earth. Yes, two previously irreconcilable spouses, probably never in love in the first place, somehow find each other as well as a mutual purpose in life, and should go on to spend a fulfilling life together.
The problem seems to lie within the screenplay, which is curiously flat, devoid of emotion. This film simply fails to draw the viewer in. You can learn a lot about the cholera outbreaks in early 20th century China, but it's difficult to care except in the intellectual sense.
