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The Painted Veil Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: A Simple Beautiful Story
Comment: True Love story fully living up to all my personal expectations of a story in this subject. Sometimes the only way to deal with the hurt of a betrayal, is to fully put oneself in a suicidal situation in the hopes of dying. And at that point in the midst of that fiery passion, one can grow in forgiveness wings of an unexpected flight. Sometimes the confrontation of death, can trail an access point directly to the heart & soul. Most movies which tried to capture love, always left me shaking my head at the ignorance of at least one scene or another, more often than not of which one disgraceful scene after several others. However, I'm sure most may not be able to appreciate the beauty in this simple story, but as for me I give it all 5 stars.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Not Maugham's ending, but very good
Comment: Hollywood just can't leave well enough alone. Way back in 1925 Somerset Maugham wrote a truly forward-thinking feminist story about a vapid woman who comes to realize there's more to life than the empty fun that she's always craved and been led astray by. Ever since, Maugham's ending has been twisted by filmmakers to make it a second-chance-at-love romance. This version even adds a little Chinese political subplot that was entirely absent from the book. So the Chinese background gets modernized, while women are thrown back into love story land in the last reel. So it goes.

But when a movie is this well put together, who cares? The screenplay--despite my quibble with the direction the end takes--is very sharp. The scenery is magnificent, and the acting is stellar. Naomi Watts captures Kitty Fane's vapidity and makes her not just understandable but sympathetic. Edward Norton is likewise great as her husband Walter, a man who in his anger at being cheated on decides to take them both on a suicide mission to a cholera-plagued area. The supporting cast is excellent--especially Toby Jones and Diana Rigg.

The movie holds up to repeated viewings because the performances are so good, and the mood created by the director is mesmerizing. Music plays a big part in its success. The selective use of a piano piece by Satie is enhanced by a score that sounds as if Satie had composed the whole thing. I actually scrambled to find out whether the waltz featured in the score was Satie's--it wasn't. Just beautiful.

It's sad that movies like this don't meet with more success in the movie theaters.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: wonderful movie
Comment: 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.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A Real Love Story
Comment: 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.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A loveless marriage and a Cholera epidemic in 1925 China
Comment: 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.

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