Click to watch

Trailer for "The Painted Veil"

It surely must happen only rarely that anyone has occasion to compare Edward Norton with Bill Murray, but Norton’s new film provides us with such an opportunity. About 23 years ago, Murray managed to persuade 20th Century Fox to pay for another movie version of W. Somerset Maugham’s serio-camp 1930s novel, The Razor’s Edge—there having already been one too many, the 1946 effort starring Tyrone Power as the young seeker of eternal truth. Murray’s success was short-lived; his movie was a flop, a passing strange one.

By his own account, Norton spent years trying to get backing for a third movie based on Maugham’s 1925 novel, The Painted Veil. And as in Murray’s case, the results pose the question that was obvious anyway: Why bother?

It’s not that this one is as tediously silly as Murray’s, but it is a curious vehicle. The 82-year-old novel seems to have proven rather resistant to the attempt to refashion it into something with contemporary significance. It’s hard to discern what fueled Norton’s quest.

The film takes us back to Maugham’s favorite literary stamping ground: British colonial territory and suzerainties in the first third of the 20th century, this time China in the 1920s. Kitty Fane (Naomi Watts, who is also co-producer with Norton) is listlessly residing in Shanghai with her new husband, Walter (Norton), a medical researcher at a government facility, when she strays from her boring marriage into adultery with Charlie Townsend (Liev Schreiber), a rakishly cynical vice-counsel. Brief flashbacks tell us of her abrupt marriage to Walter in England, a step she took to escape spinsterhood and a hectoring, overbearing mother.

Ron Nyswaner’s script makes it clear enough we’re to regard them as mismatched. Walter is a politely diffident suitor, a slightly geeky, if well-bred, lab rat, and Kitty is…well, she’s sort of vacuously independent. This is a union of mind and a self-regarding temperament.

When Walter discovers her liaison, he reacts with a cold fury and hies off to China’s remote interior to help battle a cholera epidemic with his desperately reluctant, unfaithful wife in tow. We are given to understand that he doesn’t much care if either of them returns alive.

Any moviegoer who can’t suss out where all this is headed probably isn’t interested enough to try. The efforts of the stars, Nyswaner and director John Curran to give Maugham’s dry, period pop-culture artifact some juice are in evidence. They seem to have aimed for a tone of lyrical, transcendent passion, and a depiction of moral reclamation. Reportedly, Maugham’s emphasis was on Kitty’s moral development. Curran and company haven’t quite succeeded with their spin. His direction is carefully measured and effectively atmospheric. He and cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh have devised images whose elegant composition, muted luminous light and depth of field subtly suggest 10th-century Chinese paintings.

But the details and dynamic of the movie couple’s changing relationship are never really persuasive, and the film isn’t helped by Norton’s crabbed, tight performance. He comes off as an emotionally immature and stifled young man who wouldn’t be capable of finding salvation in his wife’s arms. Watts’ Kitty communicates more feeling and personal experience, but she too is trapped by the story’s cultural origins and limitations. The ending, intended as touchingly ironic, is too hurried and mechanical.

The Painted Veil (the title doesn’t seem to allude to anything relevant anymore now) never really escapes the sense that it’s a more literate, high-minded version of an old-fashioned women’s picture, a middle-brow second cousin to a Harlequin Romance.