Top actors lift "Painted Veil"

Actress Naomi Watts poses for photographers at the premiere of 'The Painted Veil' in Hollywood December 13, 2006.

"The Painted Veil" sets a few fine actors to work with one of W. Somerset Maugham's 1920s tales of Occidentals confronting the Far East and their own tangled emotional lives.

With steely precision, Naomi Watts and Edward Norton play a mismatched couple who can barely tolerate each other's company. Meanwhile, Liev Schreiber and Toby Jones represent in finely detailed performances two very different kinds of British colonialists in China. Crucially, screenwriter Ron Nyswaner has added a political dimension that gives the melodrama more complicated and meatier themes.

The two leads and positive critical reaction will help sell "Painted Veil" in adult specialty venues. The film is unusual in that it is a co-production with the Chinese. Whatever difficulties this imposed on the Western filmmakers, the reward is a period film that feel authentic to its time and place.

A white man and woman arrive in a remote, wintery part of China. As they await the arrival of porters and sedan chairs to convey them to their final destination, the movie explains their unlikely presence in this far corner of the world with a few succinct flashbacks.

Kitty (Watts), an upper-class woman on the verge of spinsterhood, meets Dr. Walter Fane (Norton), a serious-minded bacteriologist, during a party at her parents' London home. The doctor falls instantly in love with her, but she is indifferent to him. Yet when he blurts out a marriage proposal, days before he is to return to his civil service post in Shanghai, a strange thing happens: She accepts, mostly to put as much distance as possible between her and a boring family life, especially her nagging, overbearing mother.

The mismatch is clear from the moment the couple arrives in Shanghai. Now bored in a new way, Kitty carelessly starts an affair with English Vice Consul Charlie Townsend (Schreiber). When Walter discovers his wife's adultery, he punishes them both by accepting a job as doctor in Mei-tan-fu, a remote village in the grip of a deadly cholera epidemic.

Things are, if anything, worse than imagined. The couple is not only surrounded by death, but all foreigners' lives are further endangered when news reaches the village that British troops killed large numbers of Chinese demonstrators in Shanghai.

Here lies the guts to the story, in which two people actually get to know each other under extreme circumstances and gain newfound respect and eventually love before a tragic end. In this process, three very different people become snarled in their lives.

Army Colonel Yu (Anthony Wong) is none too happy to see any Westerners in his corner of the world, but he helps Walter, albeit reluctantly, execute his ideas for relieving the conditions causing the cholera. The Mother Superior ( Diana Rigg) of a French convent lets the lonely housewife work with the youngsters the convent has taken in during the epidemic. In this way, Kitty slowly comes to realize what her husband is up against.

But the key person is Deputy Commissioner Waddington (Jones), who at first seems like a burnt-out case gone native with a Chinese mistress and fondness for opium. But with further contact, he proves a kind and resilient man who is a model of compassion, which both Walter and Kitty so sadly lack.

The story suffers from predictability, about which there is little director John Curran or Nyswaner can do. This is somewhat offset by highlighting the East-West conflict, in which cultural and historical imperatives cause Westerners not to understand why the Chinese are so resistant to an "aid" that comes with so many conditions attached.

Watts' Kitty is a very modern woman for 1925. While her highbrow high jinks may remind you of Lucy Tantamount in Aldous Huxley's 1928 novel "Point Counterpoint," the difference is that China throws everything in sharp relief: her boredom, fear of the unknown and the spiritual emptiness of Western self-absorption.

By contrast, Norton's doctor is almost antediluvian. He is a man from another era in his relations with both women and foreigners. He suffers whenever he experiences disappointment with each, thereby falling into silent anger and self-loathing.

Schreiber, Jones and Rigg play characters who epitomize different aspects of the colonial experience in Asia. Each has an agenda and is only kidding him- or herself that the goals are selfless and apolitical.

Curran marshals his resources well in a country notoriously difficult for foreign filmmakers. Cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh and designer Tu Juhua perform magic in Guangxi Province, the 800-year-old town of Huang Yao and soundstages in Beijing, as they beautifully capture this strange land that intrigues and baffles its foreign visitors.