An adaptation of Somerset Maugham, and apparent labour of love for producer-star Edward Norton, it’s both intriguing and intelligent, but also oddly prissy. Norton and co-star Naomi Watts are both more than a little miscast as a repressed but intense doctor and his flapper wife, and it takes a long time for both actors to ease into their roles. Both try on their ever-so-Brief Encounter accents and muddle through a familiar type of story essayed with very little zest by John Curran, whose framings, edits, and general mise-en-scene hews well within the safe limits of the bourgeois period film, not approaching the energy and layered irony with which Joe Wright tackled the same genre in Atonement.
Surprisingly for the director of Praise – a bad film that at least had uncommon ambitions – even the sex scenes maintain a gauze-draped staleness of style. The story moves well enough – Maugham’s tale feels both hokey, and yet also rather too meaty, for this treatment, building to predictable scenes that constantly feel like they ought to have far more power than they do, like Norton’s impact-free death, and the tacked-on epilogue where Liev Schreiber’s dull cad gets told off, which seriously makes you wonder why you bothered watching.
The central story movement has heft – two people, married and yet virtually alien to each-other, finding ideals and experiences that can unite them realised through an equally alien landscape that offers up rich new potentials, whilst death and horror lurk behind the lustrous locales. If Maugham’s writing was often cleft by a simultaneous brilliance at describing worldly pleasures and a straining interest in near-mystical heights of altruism and service, the screenplay successfully captures the notion of flawed people who transcend their flaws, whilst Curran’s direction entirely lacks flavour.
It also lacks the full fleshiness of melodrama that makes a very similar tale, King Vidor’s adaptation of A.J. Cronin’s The Citadel, work so memorably – this sort of film needs that hunger for melodrama to work, rather than dopey scenes of our hero tripping over to remind us of his humanity. Diana Rigg makes a welcome appearance in a nothing role. The delightful Toby Jones plays a character who might as well be called the Honorary Consul (mindful of the debts Greene owed Maugham), and his contribution to their lives – getting them stoned on opium and dancing with his young, adoring Chinese mistress – provides just the right jolt of luscious decadence for the couple and the film.
It’s perhaps also interesting to note the number of films set in Republican China that are beginning to be made, as a kind of route back into that nation for Western eyes and ears.
