Who knew that cholera could bring two people together? If only others knew of its marriage saving power, maybe the divorce rate would go down. In “The Painted Veil” Walter (Edward Norton) and Kitty (Nomi Watts) get married purely for convenience and not for love. Walter loved Kitty, but knew the only reason she was marrying him was to make her mother happy, but he went through with it anyway. They go about their lives ignoring each other while keeping up the appearance of a happy marriage. When Walter finds that Kitty is having an affair with Charlie Townsend (Liev Schreiber), he takes her into the heart of the cholera epidemic in China. Walter is there to help stop the spread of the disease while Kitty spends time at home. She begins to feel restless and eventually volunteers at the local orphanage. Once there she sees exactly how caring her husband is and starts to see him in a new light.
While this is a decent movie, it is also a slow movie. It seems to drag on and on and never go anywhere. Nomi Watts and Edward Norton save this movie from becoming as bad as the disease it is about. Both have had mainstream success, but it is in these smaller movies that they shine. They give powerful yet quiet performances. As a viewer, you want to hate Kitty, but Watts makes her someone you can’t hate as much as pity. Kitty is spoiled and only gets married to get her mother to stop trying to set her up. She never really gets to know Walter. She uses him and he uses her. Watts is a good actress who has had an erratic career. She has been in big movies, with mega budgets like “King Kong,” but then has movies like this one where she shows her acting ability and shines. She plays Kitty as someone who seems to have no good qualities and stands little chance of turning it around. Once she starts working at the orphanage, we see another side of her and she becomes a better person in the eyes of the audience.
The one performance I was worried about at first was Edward Norton. He is one of the best actors working today. He is an actor who consistently delivers amazing performances, but for the first 20 minutes or so, I was worried he may have finally failed. When he tells Kitty that she has to come with him to China or he will divorce her, resulting in public embarrassment for her and her lover, he was once again the actor I had seen before. We should feel pity for Walter, but he is just as cruel to Kitty as she is to him. He knows she did not merry for love, but he does not care. He goes along with it and was as miserable as she is with their “marriage”. Norton turns Walter from a one-dimensional pawn, to a vengeful, spiteful husband who wants to see his wife suffer. When Kitty starts working, he sees that she is not cold hearted and has a caring side. He begins to warm up to her and his love is rekindled. 
“The Painted Veil” was not painful to sit through, but ultimately, the movie leads nowhere. Watts and Norton save it from its self. The movie moves along at a snail’s pace, achieves much less then it was aiming for and in the end be just another notch on the acting bedposts of Watts and Norton. Not exactly a must see, but the performances are enough to warrant at least a rental.
7 out of 10
Rated PG-13 for some mature sexual situations, partial nudity, disturbing images and brief drug content.
Runtime: 125 min
When one sees as many movies as I do, you tend to notice the same stories told over and over. For the most part the inspiring, feel good, “based on a true story” movies are a dime a dozen. “Freedom Writers” is at the top of the list. Erin Gruwell (Hilary Swank) is a new teacher at newly integrated Wilson High School teaching freshman and sophomore English. Her students are all inner city kids from different ethnic backgrounds. All teachers have given up on these students; they feel that they will never amount to anything so they don’t bother challenging them. Erin feels otherwise. She pushes them to forget their differences and accept their similarities. She takes the chance on them that the other teachers will not.
When an actor revives an Oscar for their performances, they are expected to bring that caliber of acting to every performance. Swank fails to impress in this movie. She comes off as way to cheerful and way to optimistic. I felt she should have been committed to some type of asylum because she was smiling way too much. They students are the standouts in this movie. They are all unknowns and deliver some of the more emotional performances. Once scene comes at the beginning of sophomore year. They each give a toast to the class. One gets up and reads how he was kicked out of his home over the summer and his life was tough, but when he saw the kids in his class at school that day he felt better and that English class allowed him to forget about the struggles and just be with his friends.
Many of the students are in gangs, have seen friends killed, been shot at and have this hate of others so ingrained in them from an early age. They put on an act of toughness on the streets. They have to in order to get by. The classroom is the only place they can be themselves. All loyalties are gone during English class, they talk to the kids that they would not talk to on the street. For that time during English class, they are all the same. When they see how Mrs. Gruwell fights to give them a better education, they put in the effort to keep their grades up and do better in school.
One thing that really bugged me and got in the way of really enjoying this movie was the other teachers who didn’t like what Mrs. Gruwell was doing. They were always telling her not to bother and wanted never put in any effort to help her. They were racist in their thinking. They thought that because these students were minorities they would not amount to anything. Maybe I’m just hoping that people are just not that mean, but they were unrealistically ignorant. 
There have been so many movies of this genre, where some teacher takes a chance on the students that others have given up on. These are the inspiring stories that people watch for the feel good aspect. A person triumphing over adversity is a plot device that everyone seems to love. This one is exactly like every other movie of its type. The students are really the standout performances in this movie and what make this better then the average “feel good.” It is worth seeing if you are a fan of this genre, or if you just want to see some standout performances by actors who aren’t getting paid millions to be there.
7 out of 10
Rated PG-13 for violent content, some thematic material and language.
Runtime: 123 min
