New DVD Recommendations: The Painted Veil and Breaking and Entering

May 08th, 2007 | Category: DVD Reviews

Filed under: DVD Reviews, New on DVD, Hold the ‘Fone

Is it Valentine’s Day again? Am I lost something? Did those sneaky folks by at Hallmark pull one by on us again? (I bet they’re still laughing at me for buying all those Thomas Crapper Day cards.) How else do you explain that week’s romance-heavy DVD slate? Music and Lyrics, Because I Said So, Catch and Release, The Painted Veil, Breaking and Entering… My advice? Forget the comedies and stick with the romantic tragedies of the bunch.

The Painted Veil
On the surface it screamed Oscar bait, but John Curran’s follow-up to We Don’t Live Here Anymore is much more Memoirs of a Geisha than Merchant Ivory, minus the lofty expectations and blatant disregard for ethnic accuracy. It’s better than Geisha, don’t get me wrong, but feels a little more syrupy and conventional than it probably should. And though the film is predictable, it still packs a solid punch. Kitty (Naomi Watts) is a 1920s Englishwoman who claims she doesn’t want to marry “just any Tom, Dick or Harry,” but when Edward Norton’s buttoned-down bacteriologist Dr. Fane comes calling, it appears she’s gone with the middle option. After Kitty quells her post-marital boredom with some fun-time adultery (that Liev Schreiber is irresistible), the doctor whisks her off to his new workplace, the epicenter of a nasty disease outbreak in a remote Chinese village, where we attempt to figure out whether he’s just plain evil, or just not handling scorn particularly well. Hey, why strangle the cheat when you can watch all of the liquids drain out

of her at the hands of cholera?
Rent or buy the DVD

Breaking and Entering
Anthony Minghella detours from directing films like the one above for more “personal” fare, and the aftermath is an engaging drama, even whether it’s far from his best work. What it does share in common with the period piece Painted Veil? The heavily looming theme of adultery, a topic Jude Law should really try to avoid from here on in. Law plays a London architect who’s just moved his office quarters into a shady square of town quickly gentrifying. soon after he gets robbed. Repeatedly. He responds by staking out the joint, chasing the teenage thugs home, and eventually beginning a torrid affair with one of their mothers (Juliette Binoche, putting the “sexy” back into “Bosnian immigrant”). The scenario, at that point, obviously turns a little more complex. As a character study, the film succeeds… mostly. Its fatal flaw is that it’s hard to believe some of the actions and motivations of its main characters. Luckily, its characters, and the actors playing them (including Robin Wright Penn as Law’s wife), manufacture it interesting sufficient to forgive.
Rent or buy the DVD