This Painted Veil (4 stars out of 4 stars)

Spoilers Await!

This weekend, J, his wife, H, my wife and me watched the 2006 film adaptation of Someset Maugham's 1925 novel of the same name, This Painted Veil. The film starred the beautiful Namoi Watts who plays Kitty, a shallow and spoiled British aristocrat who marries a boring, infectious disease specialist and civil servant named Walter played by the incredibly talented Edward Norton. When Walter learns that Kitty is having an affair, he gives her a choice: either travel into inland China with him, where he is going as a volunteer for a peasant hospital that is currently experiencing the worst cholera epidemic in known history, or be divorced by him the following day. When she resists, he gives her a third option, which is to marry her lover, but this it turns out isn't really an option, after Watts realizes the philanderer wants her only as his mistress whore, and not his wife. And so Kitty agrees and ventures into inland China with her husband into a cholera epidemic - into almost certain death.

I'll just lay out my impression of the film, but I don't mean this as it's the only impression. I saw the movie as a story of redemption, providence and grace. Walter responded to Kitty's' adultery with poisonous bitterness. The bitterness grew up in his soul like a diseased tree and was so all consuming that he in essence plotted an elaborate trap to murder her by increasing the chances of her becoming infected with cholera, which at the time was a horrible death. But while there, several things happen to each. For one, Walter witnesses firsthand cholera's effects. As an infectious disease specialist, he was not a clinician and thus had never actually seen the disease except under a microscope or in a book. While the movie doesn't stress this, one has to believe that witnessing the cruel fate he has imposed on his wife must have shook him. Secondly, Kitty meets her neighbor, the portly and ugly Mr. Waddington. Waddington has an exotic and usually naked Chinese woman who lives with him, whom Kitty appears to mistake for a prostitute. One can almost imagine Kitty's thoughts, in fact - how else would this ugly man have such a beautiful seductress as a lover? But we later learn that this is not true - the woman with Waddington is either his wife or his common-law wife. Waddington, many years earlier, had helped a poor Chinese familiy with some government issues, after which the youngest daughter apparently gave her life to him. She was a very young girl at the time, and three times followed Waddington, each time resulting in him sending her back home. Finally, he caved and they became lovers, and by all appearances, husband and wife. Kitty asks the drunk Waddington one night what his wife sees in him (an insulting question, but one Waddington clearly understands, since the union is so unbalanced on the surface). Waddington translates the question into Chinese so that his wife can answer, to which she answers, "you are a good man." Kitty smiles and laughs, saying "What woman has ever loved a man for his virtues?" We already begin to see, though, that such a realization is changing her slowly, for all her husband's faults superficially - he is not interesting in any way at all that is relevant to her and her hierarchy of values - he is a good man. His motives for coming to China are complex. He wants to kill his wife, but even that is borne out of his genuine love for her. Bitterness is, after all, proportional to the love one has a person. People may hate Hitler, but no one was ever bitter towards him for what he did. Bitterness is an emotion and state of mind that is produced when people we deeply love disappoint or sin against us, and that is clearly what is driving Walter's actions in this movie.

Finally, Kitty's personal transformation is initiated after she volunteers to work with the Catholic orphanage. She witnesses first hand true sacrifice, character, and virtue in the lives of the nuns and the children they care for. She has never seen anything like it, apparently, and it along with the experiences in China are mirrors both exposing her shallowness and a fire burning away the dross in her heart. When her husband eventually catches cholera, she stays with him, despite the risks, sleeping with him, washing his face and messy body, til he dies of dehydration the next day. Before dying, he asks her to forgive him for what he did. He dies, is immediately buried, and she returns to London. Five years past and we see her with her five-year-old son, Walter, in a flower shop. She has gotten pregnant through her adulterous relationship in London, and had discovered this while in China after she and Walter had reconciled after the night at the Waddingtons. Walter knew the baby wasn't his, and despite both of their anguish over the consequences of her sinful liason in London, Walter said none of it mattered anymore, and they embraced in silence. While nothing is said, I suspect that this moment consummated Walter's forgiveness of Kitty. Confronted with her adultery one last time, he has a choice as to whether forgiveness and love will win in the struggle against his wounds and bitterness, and in embracing her and saying "None of it matters," the man of few words we are led to believe has finally killed the bitterness in his heart and forgiven his wife. Now we see the boy in a flower shop with is mother. His mother echoes an earlier conversation in the movie, in which in a flower shop five years earlier with the older Walter, she says that her own mother had never let her buy flowers because "why buy something you can grow for free," but since they never actually grew the flowers, they never had flowers. Now she poses the same question to her son - why buy something which will only die in a week? To which her son tells her "because it's beautiful" and so they buy the flower. We realize here what is different about her. She has given herself to something which perished - to the Chinese orphans, to her husband, and now to her son - and it had changed her. I am reminded of the bible verse that (paraphrase) says "lest a seed perish, it cannot grow into an abundance" or something to that effect. The paradox of love and life is that for others to be free, we must become their slaves. In order for my wife or my son to be free and to have happiness, I must give up my life and my happiness. But if I seize my own happiness as though it is a right, then I will have neither happiness, nor will anyone else in my life. This is the weirdness of Christian joy - that we experience joy only indirectly when finding happiness in our relationship with Christ. Only out of that can we love and be loved. When outside the flower shop, she runs into her old lover and the father of her son, Walter, she rejects his flirtatious advance to reignite their affair. When asked by her son who the man was, she simply tells him, "He was no one." He was truly no one, just as she was certainly no one. The scene reminded me of Augustine's Confessions in which Augustine ran into his old lover one day on the street, long after his conversion to Christianity. The old lover propositions him, but Augustine tells her that the man he once was he is no longer. We get the sense this is Kitty's own explanation - the one who loved everything about that old lover is dead and replaced by a woman of almost magical depth and virtue.

As an old pastor of mine used to say, if you see a turtle sitting on a fencepost, you know it didn't get there by itself. The movie was like a spiritual fable of the Christian's journey from complete and total shallowness to one of mature depth, and at a personal level, it reminded me that spiritual transformation is possible through the sacramental work of God himself in us. It reminded me of Kierkegaard's own taxonomy of spiritual progression, from the empty life to the aesthetic and then to the religious life. Kitty, as well as Walter, both experience this. And what is most encouraging and exciting to see was the One who directed this and actually redeemed the cruelties and selfishnesses of the characters. Kitty's adultery led to Walter's bitterness, which led to the impossible choice of either accepting his public divorce or going into the cholera epidemic. Had Kitty not committed adultery, who knows if Walter - being a good man - would have even volunteered. Surely some of his motivation was not just duty, but also suicidal wishes on his part. But in so doing, Walter provides a crucial public service to the Chinese, who absolutely despise his coming there - because they are nationalists, and he is British; because they are superstitious and he has to closer their water supply because it's infected with cholera. He goes, nonetheless. In one conversation with Kitty about the work of the nuns, he tells her that while they look very altruistic, in fact they have complex motives. In retrospect, I think Walter was really talking about himself. While he looks like a good man for going into the heart of a cholera epidemic, his motives are complex - even selfish. Yet God uses those selfish motives to save these Chinese villagers who benefit immensely from his difficult choices regarding the public water supply. Through his own sins, God ultimately gave Walter a wife who loved him. He, in other words, never gave up on Walter, and in fact directed his path in order to lead him to see his own sin, and to experience mercy. We get the sense that Walter genuinely believes, in the end, that his sins against Kitty are the worse, and really, how else can two people live together in love and not approach the relationship in that way? Through this, God also "saves," if I can use that language, Kitty. What we see in this is not merely the spiritual journey of two regularly flawed people - people very much like us - but primarily the gracious, stubborness of a God whose motivations are complex. He calls us into the cholera to be sacrificed for the sake of strangers, and in the process boils off the dross and reconstructs us.

For me, the movie was one of the most spiritually insightful movies I've ever seen. I was full of hope. It was like a sermon. I loved it in every way. Perfectly cast, perfectly told. Four stars.