KEY POINTS:
Herald rating: * * *
Cast: Naomi Watts, Edward Norton, Liev Schreiber, Toby Young, Diana Rigg
Director: John Curran
Running time: 125 mins
Rating: M (sexual references)
Screening: Bridgeway, Lido, Rialto
Verdict: An old-fashioned sprawling period saga looks marvellous but is far from penetrating.
The 1925 Somerset Maugham novel on which this film is based has inspired two previous adaptations, notably the 1934 version with Greta Garbo in the lead role. This version is intended as an old-fashioned sprawling saga and to say that it achieves that aim is meant both as compliment and criticism.
In visual terms - the cinematography, the impeccable yet unshowy production and costume design, the stunning rural China locations - it's a knockout, but as a psychological thriller, which is in essence what Maugham was writing, it feels underwritten and undercooked.
It's the story of Kitty (Watts), a marriageable upper-class English girl who, largely to spite her parents, accepts a sudden stuttering proposal of marriage from Walter Fane (Norton), a China-based bacteriologist.
Bored and isolated in Shanghai, she embarks on an affair with Charlie Townsend (Schreiber). Walter retaliates by taking her with him to a remote village in the grip of a cholera outbreak and the experience transforms them both.
The early events are narrated with an economy that verges on the headlong: we don't watch Kitty being self-centred, or realising that her marriage is loveless, or conceiving a passion for Charlie; these matters are taken as read. Character is revealed rather than developed.
Norton, an American, and Australian Watts are so busy struggling with their accents that they never really find their characters' hearts. But it's a solid piece of period escapism.
