Movie Maven

Politics, court intrigue and brocade. There is little more a film needs to either be a juicily good medieval, political and psycho-sexual exploration ("Richard III," "The Lion in Winter,") or a hysterically bad costume drama ("Elizabeth: The Golden Age," "Marie Antoinette,") Mining material from King Henry VIII's reign and personal life similarly almost never steers you wrong, and once you include Philippa Gregory, the mistress of vaguely erotic historical fiction, what you should have is the atomic bomb of either guilty pleasures or legitimate cinema.

Which is precisely why "The Other Boleyn Girl" is so terribly disappointing. It's not nearly good enough to be considered a legitimate film in its own right, nor is it bad enough to become a cult classic or even immediate guilty pleasure. It's sense of self-importance is not charming or silly, but simply off-putting, and forgettable.

The story follows a fictionalized account of Henry VIII's (Eric Bana) prolonged affair with Mary Boleyn (Scarlett Johansson), sister to future queen Anne Boleyn (Natalie Portman). It had a promising trailer, with hilarious nuggets of dialogue such as "We're sisters- and therefore born to be rivals," and "He came out besotted!" It was adapted from Gregory's novel of the same name by Peter Morgan. Morgan boasts a good resume, with "The Last King of Scotland," "The Queen" and HBO's "Longford" under his belt, but I got the feeling that he didn't quite know what to do with "Boleyn Girl." The dialogue is too meandering, and generally relegated to advancing the plot rather than reflecting on what's happening. Henry switches from Mary to Anne and back several times; the audience is supposed to feel the drama every time, but the triangle becomes monotonous after a while.

Gregory, while perhaps not a purveyor of great literature, has a firm grasp of the genre she writes in. The text has an excellent balance of fact and creative extrapolation, and the tone has a sense of what issues within the book should be taken seriously and what should not. The movie was for some reason unable to take the same approach- it seemed too queasy for a good exploration of the serious bits, and too egotistical to poke any fun at the genre. The supposed incest between Anne and her brother George (Jim Sturgess), for example, was handled very badly. It comes out of nowhere, is resolved too quickly and has a weird mix of delicacy and grotesqueness that does nothing but demonstrate that the producers were not happy with having an incest theme in a high-budget commercial film.

Portman, Johansson, and Bana all acquitted themselves nicely with the material they were given, though none of them stood out as especially grand. The only actor with any meat to her performance was Kristen Scott Thomas as the Boleyn girls' long-suffering mother. Thomas manages to lasso a performance that could have easily been swept away in all the tulle and commands the screen whenever she appears. When she is there, she is the only one you look at. David Morrissey is also splendid as the scheming Duke of Norfolk who pimps out the Boleyn girls.

Bana was fine as Henry. But I wonder if it would not be braver to cast, say, Vincent D'Onofrio as Henry, or James Gandolfini. Or Philip Seymour Hoffman. A larger man, with a sense of girth and majesty would make far more sense than (admittedly smoking hot) Eric Bana. Casting Bana opposite Portman and Johansson also shies away from the fact that the Boleyn girls were 14 and 15 when they were sent to the king, who was approaching his late 30s. Director Justin Chadwick seems to want to show all the soft-focus sexiness of Henry's personal life, but none of the yuckiness.

To create a believable sense of noble life during King Henry's reign it is imperative to first lose any sense of modern culture. The one thing that continually irritated me while reading Gregory's book, and while watching the film was how indignant the Boleyn girls were about their situation. There's a constant stream of feminist critique within the dialogue, and unforgivable lines like "The world's not changed that much yet. Men still rule." It ignores the fact that women were not indignant about their situation in life. They did not complain, nor rebel against their male oppressors. The ones that did, first of all, were burned or hanged as witches. But for most, they were raised to believe that this was their lot in life- this was the proper way things were done. Being pimped out to the king after your married was a great idea. The idea that this was wrong or exploitative would not have occurred to most of them. Wouldn't it be more horrific to simply show how women were basically owned by their fathers until they were sold to be owned by their husbands, rather than telling everyone in toothless, contrived dialogue? Would that not make it even more remarkable that it was not the longed-for male heir that succeeded Henry after his death, but Anne's daughter, Elizabeth? Chadwick seems content to simply have the Boleyn girls make furious shouts to the wind about the indignity of their place in society- something I doubt the real Anne Boleyn would ever have done.

Photo courtesy of Shakefire.com.