The Other Boleyn Girl
Columbia Pictures, 129mins, PG-13


Directed by
Justin Chadwick

Few historical stories have been told as many times as has that of the founding of the Anglican Church. It's gotten moldy over the years to be sure, and yet for some reason, romance novelists and their readers have never gotten tired of it.

This time, the focus is on Anne Boleyn's (Natalie Portman) sister Mary (Scarlett Johansson), you know, the one who got their first, got dumped, and then managed to live to a ripe old age.

They and their brother George (Jim Sturgess) were living an upper-middle class life with their parents Sir Thomas (Mark Rylance) and Lady Elizabeth (Kristin Scott Thomas), and were doing rather well, what with Mary getting married to William Carey (Benedict Cumberbatch) and all. Things were just peachy, that is until King Henry VIII (Eric Bana), he was comes to pay a visit. As we all know, his wife Queen Katharine (Ana Torrent) had twenty kids, only one of which managed to live past a couple of weeks, and the lack of a male heir, and the possibility that England might be taken over by the perfidious Scots [his sister Margeret was Queen regent for her son King James V], vexed his majesty mightily.

Knowing this, the evil Duke of Norfolk (David Morrissey) came up with a dastardly plan: He would pimp out his niece, Anne Boleyn, to the king, and thus shower the whole clan with gifts of treasure and power, Anne blows it, but Mary somehow manages to win HM's heart, and it is she who goes to court, leaving hubby and sis in the process. Anne, being the evil bitch that she was beheaded for being later on, manages to get revenge on poor Mary, who was pregnant with Henry's bastard child. [This wasn't the case in real life]

Now, skipping over the obligatory stuff, what's interesting here is that Anne is guilty of what she's beheaded for in the film. She's clearly a woman ahead of her time, and but she's the villain here and Portman plays her a bit on the histrionic side. Sure the stakes were really high, but Portman's Anne is really mean, unlike saintly Mary, who only sins because she has to. Henry VIII is just seen as a romantic, while the rest of the men are a bunch of fascist pigs.

The problem is the script, Peter Morgan, who had done some really excellent ones on royalty and politics, just cannot do what's basically a glorified Harlequin romance, and thus the whole thing  doesn't really get anywhere.

The BBC did the whole thing much better in the '70s. See if you can rent those.


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