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You know the story: A man is so preoccupied by his job that he can't hear a truer calling, beckoning him to love. Some liberated woman soon picks the padlock on his heart, imploring him to love her, at all costs, even if it kills him.
In The Painted Veil, a buzz-cut Edward Norton toils in 1920s three-piece suits, sweating under the weight of Somerset Maugham's original novel. The somber epic begins in London parlors, where Kitty (Naomi Watts) is approaching spinsterhood amid a cloistered world of cross-stitching and piano practice. Norton plays Dr. Walter Fane, who falls for the luminous, implausibly available Kitty from across a crowded room. Sensing her indifference, he assures her: "I think I improve greatly upon acquaintance."
So he does, and soon they marry and move to Shanghai, although Kitty's new husband, a wearying bacteriologist, proves to have an undiagnosed case of self-regard. She takes up with a society rake (Liev Schreiber), and her doctor flips out, offering either a ruinous divorce or a dangerous nine-day move to a village in the wilds of China's Mei-tan-fu province. In the latter, a cholera outbreak might kill them both if anti-imperialist rebels don't first, but she chooses the hamlet anyway. During tense scenes inside their dark cabin, Walter and Kitty seem to race each other toward death, both refusing to be inoculated and daring the other with careless stupidity. Watched over by a bodyguard, Kitty seeks distraction through their expat neighbor (the dazzlingly creepy Toby Jones) and his caged-bird, opium-smoking concubine.
Over time, the couple find separate ways to help French nuns help the locals, and, as with their first surprise meeting, they grudgingly stumble upon things about each other that they never would have known under less precarious circumstances. Against their will, they fall in love, which saves them both—and also rescues an otherwise leaden movie, with all its thunderclouds, bedpans, and smoldering resentment. Watts's blue eyes are red-rimmed and darting throughout a languid but riveting performance, while Norton's work as Walter is as strenuous and heroic as the good doctor's daily ministrations.
In Stranger Than Fiction, Will Ferrell plays an IRS auditor, Harold Crick, who lives to count beans until a tattooed baker (Maggie Gyllenhaal) makes his dough rise. Director Marc Forster wakes up from the mournful earnestness of Finding Neverland and, as if overcaffeinated, attempts to make his own loopy but sentimental Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Here, the tax man apologetically intrudes on the ledgers of small businesses, and on one such audit, Ana the yeasty baker crackles with indignation. "Mr. Crick, you're staring at my tits," she protests.
"If I was," says Harold, "it was only as a representative of the U.S. government." It's one of Ferrell's many winning displays of naiveté, and Ana—and the audience—easily fall for his hangdog humility. Suddenly Harold feels like he's losing control of his life, though he never had much control in the first place: He's actually a character in a novel in progress, written by the neurotic chain-smoker Karen Eiffel (the superb Emma Thompson). As she puts her protagonist through his paces, she is cruel fate in human form. The newly besotted Harold just wants to spoon with Ana, jam on an electric guitar, and write his own happy ending, but Eiffel has other ideas. "I'm not in the business of saving lives—in fact, quite the opposite," she says.
Forster gluts his film with homages to fellow directors Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, and Wim Wenders. So many shout-outs amount to a showy clamor, but it's Ferrell who admirably, plaintively turns down the volume. It's a breakthrough that surpasses the serious performances of Jim Carrey, with all their look-at-me character breaks, and thus only Steve Carrell remains Ferrell's rival as the Hollywood clown who best demonstrates dramatic chops. In Fiction, Ferrell's mopey face never seems grease-painted, and his smiles, which take a full hour to form, become all the more contagious.
