Film

Playing dress-up

The Other Boleyn Girl is fancy but hollow

Josh Bell

Despite all the complex intrigue, adultery, backroom deals and beheadings that went on in the courts of European royal families in centuries past, movies like The Other Boleyn Girl consistently make up even more ludicrous details to hold their audience’s attention, and almost always end up worse off for it. Boleyn, based on a popular novel by Philippa Gregory, actually tones down many of the sensationalistic embellishments that made the book both controversial and successful. The film’s account of the rivalry between Anne Boleyn (Natalie Portman), second wife of King Henry VIII of England, and her sister Mary (Scarlett Johansson), who was the king’s mistress before he married Anne, is often rather bland and flat, and when the movie does occasionally unleash its seedier side, it does so awkwardly and unconvincingly.

Portman does her best to spice things up as the devious, scheming Anne, a portrayal that differs from the traditional historical view; the novel and the movie conceive of Anne as a nasty social climber, in contrast to the more naïve and trusting Mary, who as the film begins wants nothing more than to spend a quiet life in the country with her new husband. The girls’ father and uncle have other ideas, though, basically pimping their young charges out to King Henry (Eric Bana), whose first wife has been unable to provide him with a male heir. Although Anne is first tasked with catching Henry’s eye, he instead falls for the demure Mary, and takes her as his mistress.

But by the time Mary gives birth to the son that Henry has been so desperately hoping for, the King has already moved on to seductress Anne, who strings him along while leaving her sister alone and cast aside. Despite the exaggerations and historical liberties (whether Mary’s son was really fathered by Henry is a subject of much debate), the movie moves along dully and ploddingly, with a script full of wooden, explanatory dialogue and direction from British TV veteran Justin Chadwick that mostly looks like, well, a TV movie.

Both Portman and Johansson offer passable British accents at best, and Johansson isn’t much of a presence as the virtuous Mary. Portman, who tends to play likeable innocents, brings Anne’s nastiness slowly and effectively to the surface, even if her lines aren’t as juicy or cutting as they ought to be. David Morrissey, as the girls’ uncle, takes things one step further, and turns the character into an over-the-top villain, eager to sell out his family for any chance at power. What could have been an interesting exploration of how families had to sacrifice their children’s happiness and free will to get ahead in society (despite the portrait of the Boleyns being heavily fictionalized) becomes impossible to take seriously whenever Morrissey is onscreen.

Writer Peter Morgan penned solid inner-workings-of-government films The Queen and The Last King of Scotland, but here the political machinations are really secondary to the melodrama, and the film tries too hard to maintain its respectable veneer. Showtime’s series The Tudors, which covers much of the same ground, features plenty of nudity and piles on the soap-opera antics; it may be bad, but it at least has a trashy charm.

There’s no such charm to The Other Boleyn Girl, which is neither as lurid as The Tudors nor as lavish as Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth films, to which it owes an obvious debt. It’s not accurate enough to be a valuable history lesson, and its departures do little to justify themselves dramatically. It’s just another pointlessly dressed-up take on a story that’s already plenty overdressed.

The Other Boleyn Girl

** 1/2

Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Eric Bana

Directed by Justin Chadwick

Rated PG-13

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