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List Price: $27.95 | | Label: Warner Home Video
Salesrank: 757
Released: May 8, 2007 |
| Our Price: $10.61 |
| Used Price: $6.95 |
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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:
Beyond the Veil 
2008-08-07 - I just watched this movie. Thoughts around China in fact lead me to it, as the torch gets carried through the smog and security of today's Olympic waking of the sleeping giant. Almost any review here will give you the plot and description. Or you may know the book as I did. And why should I spoil it? It's a love odyssey. I'm only going to react in the moments just after it stops playing when you are shifted a little bit off center to think about the meanings.You should see it, definitely. It conveyed so much to me that talked to women and our searches and dependence on "love." The nature of that dependency, our nature and roles, desire, passion, the person that will not love you with the risk of anything for it, and the person who does. Even to the dark threads that run in our veins. It's such a head ringer. And of course reveals the love that will take you where you should not go or, perhaps where you must go. Here oddly to cholera and China. And in the end we see a character growing so much and resolving so much, but then what does she have? Her false love rings false, her love is taken into grief...and she has self awareness. And then no one but her child's life forward. As really perhaps is the story of a woman.
It is a stunningly beautiful film, I was shaken in my core by the infidelity, the struggles, the process of development within the characters, shocked because of how accessible this is to the story of myself, of women. How it moves though the kinds of base truths that filter through a life. Rather than read this, you might just go watch, it'll be worth it.
(As a side note it took me into the thoughts I find exquisitely painful just right now. Quite a morning call to the heart...
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.
the best movie ever! edward norton is exceptional!
2008-07-30 - this is without a doubt the best movie ever made and Edward Norton gives an oscar worthy performance!!!!!
LOVED THIS MOVIE
2008-07-27 - THE PAINTED VEIL
I had this movie sitting on the shelf, kept passing it by to watch others. Wow, I LOVED this movie! It was so good, so wonderful. Edward Norton and Naomi Watts were spectacular! What took me so long to watch and totally enjoy? I was INSTANTLY immersed in this movie.
The scenery is breath-taking, the plot great. Set in the 1920's, Watts and Norton, marry -- she to please her parents and to basically get out of their house. Norton is taken with Watts and is in love with her. But, ALAS! He doesn't know how to show his love and he is too deeply involved in his work in the medical field to realize he is shutting his wife out. She gets involved in an affair with one of their friends.
Norton finds out, and to me, it seemed out of resentment, he takes a job in China to help fight a cholera epidemic. Wow, how nasty and awful this place is. While Norton is loving being there, having the medical time of his life, Watts HATES it there. To make matters worse, Norton is full of resentment and punishes Watts by ignoring her and being mean and nasty. Watts seems to be slowly going out of her mind, being in a foreign place, full of disease, political uprisings, dangerous situations!
We are taken through this village fighting cholera and the marriage and relationship of Norton and Watts. Diana Rigg as Mother Superior was wonderful, she is a superb actress.
The movie is a tear-jerker but well worth every kleenex. The ending is sad and leaves a lesson learned -- don't waste time playing games with those you love.
I HIGHLY recommend this movie, although I am probably one of the last people in the world to just have seen it. If you are in the small minority of people like me who have not seen this movie, PLEASE check it out. You will love it. Watts and Norton are such good actors and the movie is wonderful.
Thank you!!!
Pam
