The Painted Veil (2006)

Three adaptations deep into W. Somerset Maugham's 1925 novel, this 2006 version arrives with Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, a cholera epidemic, and a loveless marriage in rural China. It is a handsomely upholstered period piece, the sort that opens with a Venetian honeymoon and closes with a widow walking away from a man on a London street. The scenery is Chinese, the manners are English, and the pacing is patient. We have been here before, though usually with less care.

The production notes make the agenda plain. The screenplay was redrafted to yield a feminist reading, and the film belongs to Kitty, who travels from frivolous socialite to a woman who works in a convent music room, refuses her lover, and declines to let a man define the remainder of her life. That arc is delivered through character, not sermon. The colonial critique is folded in just as quietly. Walter serves as the proxy for Western rationalism's arrogance, a doctor who cures a village and cannot fathom its ingratitude. The folly of empire is a theme, not a placard. Chinese actors fill Chinese roles, which should be unremarkable and, in a co-production of this vintage, apparently is not. The sermonizing, such as it is, stays soft.

Everything else on the modern checklist is absent, and I deploy the word checklist with a sommelier's regret. No queer subtext, no climate parable concealed in the aqueducts, no body-positive or neurodivergent thread, history rendered as history. The faintest whiff of class resentment hangs over the imperial club, but nobody eats anybody. What remains is a sincere, faintly stodgy romance about two people learning decency in the shadow of an epidemic. It aims for the heart and the conscience at once and mostly hits the first. A tasteful vintage. Low proof.