SUCH A GOOD MOVIE
CHILDREN OF MEN
As it’s January now, with pre-Oscar buzz in full swing, so I’ll take this opportunity to make a prediction: Children of Men will not win any Academy Awards. Here’s another prediction: Oscars or no, this movie will eventually be recognized as a masterpiece. The best film of the year and one of the finest of the decade, Children of Men faces an unfortunate demise at the box-office. Critics have tried to get the word out, but considering the lousy marketing campaign and tepid opening-weekend returns, odds are that Universal Studios will chalk up Children of Men as a big-budget disappointment. The film opens with a typical morning for Theo Faron (Clive Owen): a cup of coffee, a shot of whiskey, and a terrorist bombing. Theo lives in London of 2027, where squalid camps house illegal immigrants, toxic pollution clouds the air, the government sanctions suicide pills (named “Quietus,” a nod to Hamlet), and no child has been born in two decades. When 18-year-old “Baby Diego” (the youngest person in the world) dies, all of London grieves, mourning the slow death of the entire human race. “He was a wanker,” says Theo. “Yes,” counters his hippie friend Jasper (Michael Caine), “but he was the world’s youngest wanker.” Within a hundred years, mankind will be extinct. Like nearly everyone else on Earth, Theo has lost all hope. More than a cynic, the man is a misanthrope, seemingly without the possibility of redemption. That is, until Julian (Julianne Moore), his ex-lover, comes back into his life. Julian leads the Fishes, a revolutionary group blamed for terrorist bombings (the Fishes claim Britain’s authoritarian government is responsible, but to its credit, the film never clarifies the matter). Julian asks Theo to protect a poor refugee girl, Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey). The girl, as it turns out, is pregnant; her baby represents the last beacon of hope for the human race—and for Theo.
Director Alfonso Cuarón has already produced both a near-masterpiece (2001’s acute Y tu mamá también) and a fine studio picture (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the only Potter film that retains the novels’ sense of wonder and darkness), but even these successes fail to prepare one for Children of Men. The film rapidly grows in scale, becoming a road movie, an action flick, and finally, a war picture. In two particularly note-worthy sequences, an ingeniously staged ambush and a climactic battle, the director—astonishingly—uses a single take. We’ve seen this trick before, most famously in the opening of Welles’ Touch of Evil and the nightclub sequence in Scorsese’s Goodfellas. But the extended takes in Children of Men accomplish something very different. Rather than heightening artifice, these shots bring us directly to the battlefield, dodging bullets and stepping over bodies. Critics claim that Cuarón never gives us enough information about this world and its various warring factions, but repeat viewings confirmed my initial suspicions; this film is so visually (and aurally) dense that it requires a second, and in my case, even a third look. But repeat viewings aren’t necessary to convince the viewer that this future could exist—it’s the world we’re making for ourselves every day (the movie is replete with allusions to Guantanamo, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, the Falklands, homeland security, terror alerts, and much more). Cuarón explores massively ambitious themes not through dialogue, nor even through narrative, but through a series of metaphorically rich visual motifs that encompass political, biblical, and mythic dimensions. With this remarkably sophisticated storytelling, the big picture evolves out of accumulated texture and detail. All this ambition would falter were it not for Clive Owen, whose careful performance provides the human spine that a film of this scope so sorely needs (a spine that Steven Spielberg’s recent, painfully uneven work in this genre lacks). Cuarón has a deep, tender belief in people, and the warmth and humor of Children of Men come from the tiny moments we share with these characters. Cuarón is more interested in Jasper’s strawberry-flavored joints, Julian’s ping-pong balls, and Theo’s feet than he is in the global, political, and scientific implications of infertility. Children of Men isn’t really an action movie, a sci-fi picture, or a political allegory, but a humanist epic. Its hero never picks up a gun, never kills a villain, and his moment of change—from despair to hopefulness—doesn’t come amid explosions or pyrotechnics, but with the birth of a child: just as he’s about to perform the impromptu delivery that will give hope to the human race, he sanitizes his hands with the scotch he’d once used to shut out the world.
THIS ONE'S OPTIMISTIC; THIS ONE'S GONE TO MARKET
You Are What You Expect
Are you an optimist or a pessimist? Put so starkly, the question has a fatuous ring. Unless you are in the grip of a bipolar disorder, you are probably optimistic about some things and pessimistic about others. Optimism tends to reign when people are imagining how their own plans will turn out. Research shows that we systematically exaggerate our chances of success, believing ourselves to be more competent and more in control than we actually are. Some 80 percent of drivers, for example, think they are better at the wheel than the typical motorist and thus less likely to have an accident. We live in a Lake Woebegon of the mind, it seems, where all the children are above average. Such “optimism bias,” as psychologists have labeled it, is hardly confined to our personal lives. In fact, as Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate in economics, and Jonathan Renshon argue in the current issue of Foreign Policy, it may help explain why hawkishness so often prevails at the national level. Wasn’t the Iraq war expected by proponents to be “fairly easy” (John McCain) or “a cakewalk” (Kenneth Adelman)?
But when it comes to the still bigger picture — the fate of civilization, of the planet, of the cosmos — pessimism has historically been the rule. A sense that things are heading downhill is common to nearly every culture, as Arthur Herman observes in “The Idea of Decline in Western History.” The golden age always lies in the past, never in the future. It’s not hard to find a psychological explanation for this big-picture gloominess. As we age, we become aware of our powers diminishing; we dwell on the happy episodes from our past and forget the wretched ones; moving toward the grave, we are consumed by nostalgia and foreboding. What could be more natural than to project this mixture of attitudes onto history at large?
The very idea of progress, a novelty of the Enlightenment that has been in fashion only fitfully since, can grow wearisome. “Progress might have been all right once,” Ogden Nash said, “but it has gone on too long.”
You might think scientists would be the optimistic exception here. Science, after all, furnishes the model for progress, based as it is on the gradual and irreversible growth of knowledge. At the end of last year, Edge.org, an influential scientific salon, posed the questions “What are you optimistic about? Why?” to a wide range of thinkers. Some 160 responses have now been posted at the Web site. As you might expect, there is a certain amount of agenda-battling, and more than a whiff of optimism bias. A mathematician is optimistic that we will finally get mathematics education right; a psychiatrist is optimistic that we will find more effective drugs to block pessimism (although he is pessimistic that we will use them wisely). But when the scientific thinkers look beyond their own specializations to the big picture, they continue to find cause for cheer — foreseeing an end to war, for example, or the simultaneous solution of our global-warming and energy problems. The most general grounds for optimism offered by these thinkers, though, is that big-picture pessimism so often proves to be unfounded. The perennial belief that our best days are behind us is, it seems, perennially wrong.
Such reflections may or may not ease our tendency toward global pessimism. But what about our contrary tendency to be optimistic — indeed, excessively so — in our local outlook? Is that something we should, in the interests of cold reason, try to disabuse ourselves of? Optimism bias no doubt causes a good deal of mischief, leading us to underestimate the time and trouble of the projects we undertake. But the mere fact that it is so widespread in our species suggests it might have some adaptive value. Perhaps if we calculated our odds in a more cleareyed way, we wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning.
A couple of decades ago, the psychologist Shelley Taylor proposed that “positive illusions” like excessive optimism were critical to mental health. People who saw their abilities and chances realistically, she noted, tended to be in a state of depression. (Other psychologists, taking a closer look at the data, countered that depressives actually show more optimism bias than nondepressives: given the way things turn out for them, they are not pessimistic enough.) And there is new evidence that optimism may in some ways be self-fulfilling. In a recently published study, researchers in the Netherlands found that optimistic people — those who assented to statements like “I often feel that life is full of promises” — tend to live longer than pessimists. Perhaps, it has been speculated, optimism confers a survival advantage by helping people cope with adversity.
But pessimism still appears to have its advantages. Another recently published paper observes that over the last three decades, the people of Denmark have consistently scored higher on life-satisfaction than any other Western nation. Why? Because, say the authors, the Danes are perennial pessimists, always reporting low expectations for the year to come. They then find themselves pleasantly surprised when things turn out rather better than expected.
Americans, too, are lowering their expectations, at least in one respect. According to the Census Bureau’s 2007 Statistical Abstract of the United States, most college freshmen in 1970 said their primary goal was to develop a meaningful life philosophy. In 2005, by contrast, most freshmen said their primary goal was to be comfortably rich — a more modest one, it would seem, given the relative frequency of wealth and wisdom.
As for the minority still seeking a philosophy of life, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus came up with a formula nearly a century ago that remains the perfect blend of optimism and pessimism: Things are hopeless but not serious.
MOVIES
The Painted Veil
2006Director: John Curran
Cast: Edward Norton, Naomi Watts
there’s a scene in The Painted Veil in which you can watch a man think something over and change his mind. As Dr. Walter Fane, bacteriologist attached to England’s Colonial Office in 1920s Shanghai, actor Edward Norton delivers his most economical, resonant performance to date. As Fane and his wife Kitty (Naomi Watts) argue over her affair with Vice-Consul Charlie Townsend (Liev Schreiber), Kitty persuades him to consider that it’s unreasonable to blame her entirely when he’s insisted on seeing her as other than she is. In an unhurried beat, Norton’s wounded, rational, earnest doctor considers that. Suddenly unsure, he cocks his head, gazes downward, looks up again, then quietly agrees she’s right. The acting is wonderfully deft, and forecasts much of what happens between these mismatched two when they travel far inland to the city of Mei-tan-fu during a cholera epidemic and a wave of anti-Western anger.
Based on W. Somerset Maugham’s 1925 novel of the same name, The Painted Veil has been an ensemble effort from start to finish. In the saga’s bare bones version, screenwriter Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia) and producer Sara Collecton (Showtime’s “Dexter”) acquired rights and began adapting Maugham’s book eleven years ago. In 1999 they recruited Norton, already a student of China, who worked on the script and eventually played Fane. He brought on Watts. In early 2005, she landed director John Curran (We Don’t Live Here Anymore), an ex-pat New Yorker who started making movies in Australia in 1990. Curran anchored the on-screen story’s anti-Western political unrest, left vague in the novel, to British troops’ actual massacre of Chinese demonstrators in Shanghai in May 1925.
Shot on location in Shanghai, in southern Guangxi Province’s green hills along the Li River, and on Beijing sound stages, The Painted Veil is the first Western film co-produced with the Chinese Film Bureau, with a largely Chinese crew. The film radically alters the story’s structure, quickly defining this as much cultural encounter as personal drama. Instead of opening with Kitty’s “startled cry” within her shuttered bedroom—outside, Walter has just turned the locked door’s knob while her lover’s inside with her—the film strands Walter and Kitty in a long shot at a rainy crossroads en route to Mei-tan-fu, helpless without porters, exchanging uncomprehending stares with local workers digging in the muddy hillside.
The film adds anti-British gangs who chase Kitty (and teach Walter that he cares to protect her), and expands the figure of Colonel Yu (Anthony Wong) who must juggle warlords, Englishmen, local superstition, and cholera. Gone is the novel’s protracted ending—another melodramatic encounter with an even more caddish Charlie, an ocean voyage in which China becomes “unreal,” Kitty’s mother’s death, and Kitty’s departure for the Bahamas with her father, where she imagines having a daughter she’ll raise to be independent. The film cuts all this away, assuming today’s audience can immediately envision these characters whole and viable in this setting. It provides Kitty with a five-year-old son in the London epilogue, relieves her of the novel’s highly compromising friendship with Charlie’s wife, and makes China a living presence instead of a backdrop by turns ornamental and “decadent, dirty, and unspeakable.”
Edward Norton has said the producing ensemble sought to “liberate” Walter and Kitty’s story from the novel’s limitations. In the film’s newly opened space, Walter and Kitty arguably grow into love before he dies; in the novel, Kitty emphatically never comes to love him—and arguably couldn’t.
What core remains of Maugham’s novel? First, a string of gem-bright exchanges whose dialogue the screenplay lifts almost verbatim from Maugham’s pages. What spoken words pass between Kitty and Walter, Kitty and Charlie, Kitty and Waddington the Customs officer, and Kitty and the French convent’s Mother Superior play as convincingly or better on-screen as on the page. Second, the seemingly blasé Waddington (Toby Jones) and the patrician Mother Superior (several double takes reveal that it’s Diana Rigg of Avengers fame) are characters whose alliance is provocative rather than merely eccentric—and inspired casting. Finally, the filmmakers preserve Maugham’s final judgment of Charlie Townsend as “unimportant” in Kitty’s eyes. If anything, the film strengthens this assessment by having Kitty use it as a cooler, reassuring word to her son as the story closes instead of the hot epithet she throws at Charlie. All along Kitty has pleaded that, compared with such misery surrounding them, her sins are surely minor though the pain she has caused Walter is not. By the film’s end, she’s earned that position. The Painted Veil also succeeds because its makers overcome several obvious temptations to excess that might doom a hastier project. The film refrains from making Kitty into Eleanor Roosevelt. Her transformation is right-sized—she humbles herself, tries to help the nuns and the orphans because she feels bored and useless, and she gets some unexpected joy for her efforts. Metaphorically, we could say the film never confuses her tinny piano ditties for the orphans with the score’s languid, lavish solos by pianist Lang Lang. This allows Walter and Kitty a brief romantic kindling that’s plausible instead of sentimental. The filmmakers wisely refrain from a voice-over narration by Kitty drawn from Maugham’s rendering of her inner thoughts. What the novel’s Kitty tells herself or imagines she would like to tell others is sometimes clueless, shallow, unbecoming, and frankly racist. Finally, Curran and company refrain from the epic effect. The Painted Veil does not try to be, say, Lawrence of Arabia. This means when a wife asks her husband to think about something, he can pay attention, and we can pay attention to him. People will watch this more muted film a long time.
CHILDREN OF MEN
As it’s January now, with pre-Oscar buzz in full swing, so I’ll take this opportunity to make a prediction: Children of Men will not win any Academy Awards. Here’s another prediction: Oscars or no, this movie will eventually be recognized as a masterpiece. The best film of the year and one of the finest of the decade, Children of Men faces an unfortunate demise at the box-office. Critics have tried to get the word out, but considering the lousy marketing campaign and tepid opening-weekend returns, odds are that Universal Studios will chalk up Children of Men as a big-budget disappointment. The film opens with a typical morning for Theo Faron (Clive Owen): a cup of coffee, a shot of whiskey, and a terrorist bombing. Theo lives in London of 2027, where squalid camps house illegal immigrants, toxic pollution clouds the air, the government sanctions suicide pills (named “Quietus,” a nod to Hamlet), and no child has been born in two decades. When 18-year-old “Baby Diego” (the youngest person in the world) dies, all of London grieves, mourning the slow death of the entire human race. “He was a wanker,” says Theo. “Yes,” counters his hippie friend Jasper (Michael Caine), “but he was the world’s youngest wanker.” Within a hundred years, mankind will be extinct. Like nearly everyone else on Earth, Theo has lost all hope. More than a cynic, the man is a misanthrope, seemingly without the possibility of redemption. That is, until Julian (Julianne Moore), his ex-lover, comes back into his life. Julian leads the Fishes, a revolutionary group blamed for terrorist bombings (the Fishes claim Britain’s authoritarian government is responsible, but to its credit, the film never clarifies the matter). Julian asks Theo to protect a poor refugee girl, Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey). The girl, as it turns out, is pregnant; her baby represents the last beacon of hope for the human race—and for Theo.
Director Alfonso Cuarón has already produced both a near-masterpiece (2001’s acute Y tu mamá también) and a fine studio picture (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the only Potter film that retains the novels’ sense of wonder and darkness), but even these successes fail to prepare one for Children of Men. The film rapidly grows in scale, becoming a road movie, an action flick, and finally, a war picture. In two particularly note-worthy sequences, an ingeniously staged ambush and a climactic battle, the director—astonishingly—uses a single take. We’ve seen this trick before, most famously in the opening of Welles’ Touch of Evil and the nightclub sequence in Scorsese’s Goodfellas. But the extended takes in Children of Men accomplish something very different. Rather than heightening artifice, these shots bring us directly to the battlefield, dodging bullets and stepping over bodies. Critics claim that Cuarón never gives us enough information about this world and its various warring factions, but repeat viewings confirmed my initial suspicions; this film is so visually (and aurally) dense that it requires a second, and in my case, even a third look. But repeat viewings aren’t necessary to convince the viewer that this future could exist—it’s the world we’re making for ourselves every day (the movie is replete with allusions to Guantanamo, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, the Falklands, homeland security, terror alerts, and much more). Cuarón explores massively ambitious themes not through dialogue, nor even through narrative, but through a series of metaphorically rich visual motifs that encompass political, biblical, and mythic dimensions. With this remarkably sophisticated storytelling, the big picture evolves out of accumulated texture and detail. All this ambition would falter were it not for Clive Owen, whose careful performance provides the human spine that a film of this scope so sorely needs (a spine that Steven Spielberg’s recent, painfully uneven work in this genre lacks). Cuarón has a deep, tender belief in people, and the warmth and humor of Children of Men come from the tiny moments we share with these characters. Cuarón is more interested in Jasper’s strawberry-flavored joints, Julian’s ping-pong balls, and Theo’s feet than he is in the global, political, and scientific implications of infertility. Children of Men isn’t really an action movie, a sci-fi picture, or a political allegory, but a humanist epic. Its hero never picks up a gun, never kills a villain, and his moment of change—from despair to hopefulness—doesn’t come amid explosions or pyrotechnics, but with the birth of a child: just as he’s about to perform the impromptu delivery that will give hope to the human race, he sanitizes his hands with the scotch he’d once used to shut out the world.
THIS ONE'S OPTIMISTIC; THIS ONE'S GONE TO MARKET
You Are What You Expect
Are you an optimist or a pessimist? Put so starkly, the question has a fatuous ring. Unless you are in the grip of a bipolar disorder, you are probably optimistic about some things and pessimistic about others. Optimism tends to reign when people are imagining how their own plans will turn out. Research shows that we systematically exaggerate our chances of success, believing ourselves to be more competent and more in control than we actually are. Some 80 percent of drivers, for example, think they are better at the wheel than the typical motorist and thus less likely to have an accident. We live in a Lake Woebegon of the mind, it seems, where all the children are above average. Such “optimism bias,” as psychologists have labeled it, is hardly confined to our personal lives. In fact, as Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate in economics, and Jonathan Renshon argue in the current issue of Foreign Policy, it may help explain why hawkishness so often prevails at the national level. Wasn’t the Iraq war expected by proponents to be “fairly easy” (John McCain) or “a cakewalk” (Kenneth Adelman)?
But when it comes to the still bigger picture — the fate of civilization, of the planet, of the cosmos — pessimism has historically been the rule. A sense that things are heading downhill is common to nearly every culture, as Arthur Herman observes in “The Idea of Decline in Western History.” The golden age always lies in the past, never in the future. It’s not hard to find a psychological explanation for this big-picture gloominess. As we age, we become aware of our powers diminishing; we dwell on the happy episodes from our past and forget the wretched ones; moving toward the grave, we are consumed by nostalgia and foreboding. What could be more natural than to project this mixture of attitudes onto history at large?
The very idea of progress, a novelty of the Enlightenment that has been in fashion only fitfully since, can grow wearisome. “Progress might have been all right once,” Ogden Nash said, “but it has gone on too long.”
You might think scientists would be the optimistic exception here. Science, after all, furnishes the model for progress, based as it is on the gradual and irreversible growth of knowledge. At the end of last year, Edge.org, an influential scientific salon, posed the questions “What are you optimistic about? Why?” to a wide range of thinkers. Some 160 responses have now been posted at the Web site. As you might expect, there is a certain amount of agenda-battling, and more than a whiff of optimism bias. A mathematician is optimistic that we will finally get mathematics education right; a psychiatrist is optimistic that we will find more effective drugs to block pessimism (although he is pessimistic that we will use them wisely). But when the scientific thinkers look beyond their own specializations to the big picture, they continue to find cause for cheer — foreseeing an end to war, for example, or the simultaneous solution of our global-warming and energy problems. The most general grounds for optimism offered by these thinkers, though, is that big-picture pessimism so often proves to be unfounded. The perennial belief that our best days are behind us is, it seems, perennially wrong.
Such reflections may or may not ease our tendency toward global pessimism. But what about our contrary tendency to be optimistic — indeed, excessively so — in our local outlook? Is that something we should, in the interests of cold reason, try to disabuse ourselves of? Optimism bias no doubt causes a good deal of mischief, leading us to underestimate the time and trouble of the projects we undertake. But the mere fact that it is so widespread in our species suggests it might have some adaptive value. Perhaps if we calculated our odds in a more cleareyed way, we wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning.
A couple of decades ago, the psychologist Shelley Taylor proposed that “positive illusions” like excessive optimism were critical to mental health. People who saw their abilities and chances realistically, she noted, tended to be in a state of depression. (Other psychologists, taking a closer look at the data, countered that depressives actually show more optimism bias than nondepressives: given the way things turn out for them, they are not pessimistic enough.) And there is new evidence that optimism may in some ways be self-fulfilling. In a recently published study, researchers in the Netherlands found that optimistic people — those who assented to statements like “I often feel that life is full of promises” — tend to live longer than pessimists. Perhaps, it has been speculated, optimism confers a survival advantage by helping people cope with adversity.
But pessimism still appears to have its advantages. Another recently published paper observes that over the last three decades, the people of Denmark have consistently scored higher on life-satisfaction than any other Western nation. Why? Because, say the authors, the Danes are perennial pessimists, always reporting low expectations for the year to come. They then find themselves pleasantly surprised when things turn out rather better than expected.
Americans, too, are lowering their expectations, at least in one respect. According to the Census Bureau’s 2007 Statistical Abstract of the United States, most college freshmen in 1970 said their primary goal was to develop a meaningful life philosophy. In 2005, by contrast, most freshmen said their primary goal was to be comfortably rich — a more modest one, it would seem, given the relative frequency of wealth and wisdom.
As for the minority still seeking a philosophy of life, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus came up with a formula nearly a century ago that remains the perfect blend of optimism and pessimism: Things are hopeless but not serious.
MOVIES
The Painted Veil
2006Director: John Curran
Cast: Edward Norton, Naomi Watts
there’s a scene in The Painted Veil in which you can watch a man think something over and change his mind. As Dr. Walter Fane, bacteriologist attached to England’s Colonial Office in 1920s Shanghai, actor Edward Norton delivers his most economical, resonant performance to date. As Fane and his wife Kitty (Naomi Watts) argue over her affair with Vice-Consul Charlie Townsend (Liev Schreiber), Kitty persuades him to consider that it’s unreasonable to blame her entirely when he’s insisted on seeing her as other than she is. In an unhurried beat, Norton’s wounded, rational, earnest doctor considers that. Suddenly unsure, he cocks his head, gazes downward, looks up again, then quietly agrees she’s right. The acting is wonderfully deft, and forecasts much of what happens between these mismatched two when they travel far inland to the city of Mei-tan-fu during a cholera epidemic and a wave of anti-Western anger.
Based on W. Somerset Maugham’s 1925 novel of the same name, The Painted Veil has been an ensemble effort from start to finish. In the saga’s bare bones version, screenwriter Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia) and producer Sara Collecton (Showtime’s “Dexter”) acquired rights and began adapting Maugham’s book eleven years ago. In 1999 they recruited Norton, already a student of China, who worked on the script and eventually played Fane. He brought on Watts. In early 2005, she landed director John Curran (We Don’t Live Here Anymore), an ex-pat New Yorker who started making movies in Australia in 1990. Curran anchored the on-screen story’s anti-Western political unrest, left vague in the novel, to British troops’ actual massacre of Chinese demonstrators in Shanghai in May 1925.
Shot on location in Shanghai, in southern Guangxi Province’s green hills along the Li River, and on Beijing sound stages, The Painted Veil is the first Western film co-produced with the Chinese Film Bureau, with a largely Chinese crew. The film radically alters the story’s structure, quickly defining this as much cultural encounter as personal drama. Instead of opening with Kitty’s “startled cry” within her shuttered bedroom—outside, Walter has just turned the locked door’s knob while her lover’s inside with her—the film strands Walter and Kitty in a long shot at a rainy crossroads en route to Mei-tan-fu, helpless without porters, exchanging uncomprehending stares with local workers digging in the muddy hillside.
The film adds anti-British gangs who chase Kitty (and teach Walter that he cares to protect her), and expands the figure of Colonel Yu (Anthony Wong) who must juggle warlords, Englishmen, local superstition, and cholera. Gone is the novel’s protracted ending—another melodramatic encounter with an even more caddish Charlie, an ocean voyage in which China becomes “unreal,” Kitty’s mother’s death, and Kitty’s departure for the Bahamas with her father, where she imagines having a daughter she’ll raise to be independent. The film cuts all this away, assuming today’s audience can immediately envision these characters whole and viable in this setting. It provides Kitty with a five-year-old son in the London epilogue, relieves her of the novel’s highly compromising friendship with Charlie’s wife, and makes China a living presence instead of a backdrop by turns ornamental and “decadent, dirty, and unspeakable.”
Edward Norton has said the producing ensemble sought to “liberate” Walter and Kitty’s story from the novel’s limitations. In the film’s newly opened space, Walter and Kitty arguably grow into love before he dies; in the novel, Kitty emphatically never comes to love him—and arguably couldn’t.
What core remains of Maugham’s novel? First, a string of gem-bright exchanges whose dialogue the screenplay lifts almost verbatim from Maugham’s pages. What spoken words pass between Kitty and Walter, Kitty and Charlie, Kitty and Waddington the Customs officer, and Kitty and the French convent’s Mother Superior play as convincingly or better on-screen as on the page. Second, the seemingly blasé Waddington (Toby Jones) and the patrician Mother Superior (several double takes reveal that it’s Diana Rigg of Avengers fame) are characters whose alliance is provocative rather than merely eccentric—and inspired casting. Finally, the filmmakers preserve Maugham’s final judgment of Charlie Townsend as “unimportant” in Kitty’s eyes. If anything, the film strengthens this assessment by having Kitty use it as a cooler, reassuring word to her son as the story closes instead of the hot epithet she throws at Charlie. All along Kitty has pleaded that, compared with such misery surrounding them, her sins are surely minor though the pain she has caused Walter is not. By the film’s end, she’s earned that position. The Painted Veil also succeeds because its makers overcome several obvious temptations to excess that might doom a hastier project. The film refrains from making Kitty into Eleanor Roosevelt. Her transformation is right-sized—she humbles herself, tries to help the nuns and the orphans because she feels bored and useless, and she gets some unexpected joy for her efforts. Metaphorically, we could say the film never confuses her tinny piano ditties for the orphans with the score’s languid, lavish solos by pianist Lang Lang. This allows Walter and Kitty a brief romantic kindling that’s plausible instead of sentimental. The filmmakers wisely refrain from a voice-over narration by Kitty drawn from Maugham’s rendering of her inner thoughts. What the novel’s Kitty tells herself or imagines she would like to tell others is sometimes clueless, shallow, unbecoming, and frankly racist. Finally, Curran and company refrain from the epic effect. The Painted Veil does not try to be, say, Lawrence of Arabia. This means when a wife asks her husband to think about something, he can pay attention, and we can pay attention to him. People will watch this more muted film a long time.
posted by D @ 8:36 AM
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