As a work of historical fiction, The Other Boleyn Girl is somewhat lacking. As a romantic melodrama, it can’t possibly come close to the R-rated exploits of the BBC’s The Tutors. As a movie in and of itself, it’s over-produced, over-wrought and adds little in freshness or value to a story we already know by heart: England’s King Henry VIII was a dog, he (literally) axed his second wife and probably scarred his daughter Elizabeth to the point she couldn’t trust a man enough to marry him. Also, having good-looking, buff actors play Henry… kind of disingenuous. I mean unless he was wearing a fat suit in those portraits.
Based on the book by Philippa Gregory, the movie tells the story of the lesser-known Mary Boleyn (Scarlett Johansonn), who always stood in the shadow of her more ambitious older sister Anne (Natalie Portman). When Henry VIII (Eric Bana) comes calling to the countryside, the girls’ uncle, the Duke of Norfolk (David Morrissey), sees opportunity. He puts Anne forward to catch the King’s attention to become his mistress, but it’s Mary that catches his fancy instead. Instead of moving on with her life and being content that she dodged the bullet of being used and abused by the aristocracy, Ann plots and conspires to not only usurp her little sis’ but the (then) present Queen of England as well.
Now I know that this was a whole other time and all, but this movie was a little more misogynistic than I normally like in my cinematic entertainment. A lot of time and energy is spent on the men sitting around talking about how they’re planning to pimp out their young, female family members in order to satiate the lust of the king while enhancing their power and position in the court. Instead, I think it would have been more interesting to play that off the actual Boleyn girls and how they react to all this. We get hints of that with Mrs. Boleyn played by Kristen Scott Thomas, but really not enough to satisfy me.
And honestly when you’re doing something like this, a dramatization of events unfolded 400 years ago, you got to bring something new. I mean considering that Henry and Anne was the Spitzer Hooker-gate scandal of its day, people have been talking about this for a while. As I said earlier, we’ve already seen sexy-Henry in the softcore version of The Tudors, which the very PG-13 Boleyn Girl can’t hope to duplicate. And while we’re talking about acknowledgement, how about a little regard about how thoroughly unbuff Henry VIII really was? I’m not even saying “fat suit” but maybe a scene where he’s munching a big old chicken wing, asking for seconds.
As for the acting, there isn’t that much to say. Portman vamps it up as Anne, which is actually a good look on her until she becomes all whiny and desperate in the waning days of her stint as Queen. Johansonn’s Mary should really be called “blandy” because it really is her one overriding trait. She is also whiny and codependent, but her arc is slightly interest due to a streak of independence she begins to display after being dumped by Henry for her sister. Speaking of the big man (so to speak), Bana is really terribly boring as Henry. At least Tudors Jonathan Rhys Meyers has some fire in his belly, this guy is a Jeff Lebowski short of being totally disinterested.
An uninspired effort does little and offers relatively nothing new to a familiar narrative The Other Boleyn Girl bored me. For a quality Boleyn tale check out Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold in Anne of the Thousand Days.
