Sometimes The Greatest Journey Is The Distance Between Two People

I recently received a gift, a movie entitled The Painted Veil. Even though the present was given a few weeks ago, I put off watching this movie because I thought it would be slow. It's a love story set in Colonial China, amongst a cholera epidemic, it had to be slow.

About half way through the movie, however, one character drunkenly asks another "When has a woman ever loved a man because of his virtue?". At that point, I realized I was involved, deeply affected by the heartache and cynicism of one of the characters emotional struggle with his adulterous wife. This movie had drawn me in.

I won't give too much away, but I just wanted to say I highly recommend The Painted Veil. It is full of redemption, love and sacrifice, and the scenes of Inland China are breathtaking.

Here is the synopsis, by the way:

A couple with a broken relationship learns some valuable lessons about love, life, and sacrifice in this romantic drama based on a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. It's 1925, and Dr. Walter Fane (Edward Norton) is a physician and bacteriologist who has become smitten with Kitty (Naomi Watts), the beautiful daughter of a wealthy and socially prominent family. Walter proposes marriage to Kitty and she accepts; however, while he clearly loves her, Kitty is more interested in her reputation than Walter's feelings, as she's recently turned 25, an age by which most of her peers have already wed.

Kitty and Walter move to Shanghai, where he sets up a practice and she takes a lover, the British Vice Consul Charles Townsend (Liev Schreiber). When Walter learns of his wife's infidelity, he becomes furious, and impulsively volunteers to travel to China to work in a village stricken with a major cholera epidemic. While Walter's actions are meant to punish Kitty rather than reflect his own benevolence, the daily trials of living in a community in crisis have a striking impact on the couple, giving them a new and deeper perspective on their relationship.

There is a hopeless romantic in me, and today, on this cold & dreary Sunday, it has had it's indulgences.