Ladies and Gentlemen, Naomi Watts and Edward Norton!
Though they fight like George and Martha in The Painted Veil, they look more like Nick and Nora here. Is it chemistry? Well, actually, no. What do you expect from a book inspired by Dante's Inferno? Tea and crumpets?
Administrator
August 06, 2007
Click here for more high Watt-age photos!
By Steve Garbarino
Photography by Matthew Rolston
To show no chemistry. That was the Methodesque exercise that Edward Norton and Naomi Watts faced when they signed on to play the leads in director John Curran’s sprawling take on W. Somerset Maugham’s 1920s tale of a socially awkward but all too clever British bacteriologist (Norton as Walter) and a social-climbing, past-her-prime party girl (Watts as brunette-bobbed Kitty), who choose to marry for all the wrong reasons.
Those who have read the thin, cold-blooded novel, The Painted Veil, written in 1925, know that Kitty cheats on Walter with the dashing but ethically challenged Charlie (played here by Watts’ real-life squeeze Liev Schrieber). Walter catches them, and then forces his wife to choose between being the shame of colonialized Hong Kong or joining him in the heart of a cholera epidemic, with potential hopes that she’ll catch the disease and pay dearly for her indiscretions.
READ MORE
