Generations of country-western and blues singers have laid out the protocol for what a man ought to do about his cheatin' wife, with recommended remedies involving a tall bottle of Jack Daniels at one extreme and a loaded shotgun at the other. But The Painted Veil, adapted from the novel by W. Somerset Maugham, takes place in the mid-1920s, and thus its uptight prig of a hero, bacteriologist Walter Fane (Edward Norton), lacks their wise counsel. Having rescued vain, shallow socialite Kitty (Naomi Watts) from her stifling home with his offer of a loveless marriage, he'd expected gratitude and respect, if not passion. So when it becomes clear that his bride, with whom he's recently traveled to Shanghai, has cuckolded him with the local vice consul (Liev Schreiber), Walter seizes upon a rather unique solution. He will volunteer to bring his Western medical know-how to a tiny, distant Chinese village suffering from a cholera epidemic. He will almost surely die trying to help. And Kitty, of course, will accompany him.
Even by today's standards, this is a singularly perverse romantic scenario — indeed, it's probably more perverse to a contemporary audience, since a modern-day Kitty would just flip Walter the bird and go find a lanky pop singer. Director John Curran (We Don't Live Here Anymore, which also pivoted on a faithless Watts) and screenwriter Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia) lend a slightly jagged edge to Maugham's air of vicious civility, mostly by eliding key scenes — we neither see the affair begin nor witness Walter's discovery of it, and spend much of the potentially expository first act playing catch-up. By the time the story veers in a more conventional and sentimental direction, with Kitty discovering her inner Florence Nightingale as well as Walter's more admirable qualities, you may be too engrossed to object. If only Norton, who also produced, had rejected himself in favor of a more naturally diffident actor — preferably an actual Brit. Even when Walter is ostensibly at his most feeble and remote, you can still detect the fierce undercurrent of self-determination peculiar to American movie stars. He may surprise Kitty, but he never surprises us. — Mike D'Angelo