Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen - Maltin, Leonard [75]
The suspense in Owning Mahowny doesn’t derive from wondering if the protagonist will be caught, but how and when…and how he will react when his house of cards collapses. If you happened to read journalist Gary Ross’s nonfiction book Stung, about the real-life 1982 case that inspired the film, you may already know the answers, but I don’t think being familiar with the facts could remove the drama from this expertly made movie.
There are other good films about gamblers and the nature of their addiction, but they usually deal with highs and lows. This one focuses on a guy who keeps his emotions completely bottled up, even to his supposed fiancée. (The most revealing moment in the film is a conversation he has with a psychiatrist in which he quantifies the excitement he feels when he is gambling.) Only an actor of extraordinary ability and range could play a man like this, and maintain our interest in him. That man is Philip Seymour Hoffman.
103. THE PAINTED VEIL
(2006)
Directed by John Curran
Screenplay by Ron Nyswaner
Based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham
Actors:
EDWARD NORTON
NAOMI WATTS
LIEV SCHREIBER
DIANA RIGG
TOBY JONES
ANTHONY WONG
SALLY HAWKINS
When I read that someone was making a new screen adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1925 novel The Painted Veil, I couldn’t help asking myself why. It was filmed before with Greta Garbo, back in 1934, and it’s not one of her most memorable films. MGM remade it as The Seventh Sin in 1957 with Eleanor Parker and that didn’t make a big impression either. But I didn’t reckon with the determination of actor Edward Norton, who fell in love with the book as a young man and spent years trying to get this movie made. He even persuaded Naomi Watts to costar with him and coproduce the picture. Once I saw it I understood what Norton had in mind all this time. It’s a beautiful and moving story.
The movie begins in London. Norton plays an utterly unglamorous bacteriologist who falls in love with Watts on sight and impulsively asks her to marry him. She says yes, mostly in order to get away from her overbearing mother. But when they move to Shanghai, she has an affair with a married man from the British consulate (Liev Schreiber). Feeling both betrayed and emasculated, Norton decides to punish her by volunteering to help with an outbreak of cholera in a remote part of China and insisting that she come along. How she deals with the experience, and comes to appreciate her husband, is the core of the story.
Edward Norton is not the kind of actor who shows up for work and reads his lines. He insists on getting involved in the writing process, as he did here with Ron Nyswaner, expanding Maugham’s story and exploring how a relationship as badly broken as this one can be mended, and even prevail. That emotional journey is what makes the movie so compelling.
The Painted Veil is also literally beautiful, shot on location in China (by Stuart Drysburgh) and filled with extraordinary sights that frame the story. Alexandre Desplat’s exquisite score perfectly supports the emotions on screen, and the well-matched stars are surrounded by other good actors like Liev Schreiber (who found in Watts a real-life mate); Diana Rigg, as a mother superior; and the remarkable Toby Jones, who plays a cynical British functionary stationed in the Chinese outback. (It’s the kind of part George Sanders used to play so often—and did, in the 1957 version of the story.)
I approached this movie with great skepticism and came out a believer. It’s rare to see a love story that has real substance, as this one does. The Painted Veil defies the glib category “period piece” by virtue of a sincere presentation that makes it immediate and relevant.
104. PARADISE