There is, rightly, a lot of talk and hand-wringing about the dearth of studio-generated movies made for adults, and the lack of success (or even effort) in creating a new generation of film fans, rather than just entertainment junkies and trend-following sheep who will occasionally fork over cash in exchange for colorful stimulus response.

As long as there are older white people, though, and producers like Scott Rudin who shrewdly capitalize on literary and publishing trends, there will be movies like the oh-so-well-heeled The Other Boleyn Girl, a bodice-ripper by turns passably intriguing and dreadfully inert.



If there's anything that upper-middle-class and predominantly Caucasian adult audiences like, speaking in the broadest terms, it's big screen adaptations of literary hits about historical figures that they didn't pay attention to in high school or (if they matriculated at all) college. Heck, it explains half or more of the entire audience, if not the very existence, of the History Channel. I had a former boss — the type of guy who barely skated through high school, afforded his position in life by the success of his father — who would come in to work and regularly regurgitate these narratives, meandering monologues of half-truths, mangled detail and certainly no proper contextual motivation. My guess is that it made him feel smart, worldly and more relevant, collecting these discrete, deep-fried nuggets of historical trivia.

Based on Philippa Gregory's best-selling novel of the same name, The Other Boleyn Girl is a scattershot, overwrought drama of cloak-and-dagger plotting, romance and betrayal set against the backdrop of a defining moment in British history. Against the wishes of his wife Lady Elizabeth (Kristin Scott Thomas), Sir Thomas Boleyn (Mark Rylance) and his brother-in-law, the Duke of Norfolk (David Morrissey), impress their ambitions for familial advancement on the Boleyn's two daughters. Knowing that the aging Queen Catherine of Aragon (Ana Torrent) has again recently failed to give King Henry VIII (Eric Bana) a male heir, Sir Thomas and the Duke of Norfolk contrive to attempt to have first Anne (Natalie Portman) and then younger Mary (Scarlett Johansson) seduce the king, no matter that Mary is already wed. Initially Mary wins King Henry's favor, and bears him an illegitimate son. But Anne, clever, conniving and fearless, eventually edges her sister aside in her pursuit of an even bigger prize — the throne.

Like a made-for-TV, two-hour history of World War II, The Other Boleyn Girl doesn't have a clear sense of how to artfully collapse its narrative (ignoring, for instance, the matter of Catherine being first married to Henry's deceased brother), and it certainly doesn't plumb the psychology of Anne or its other characters in any lasting or insightful way. In TV ads for the film, two lines appear (“We're sisters,” says Mary, followed by Anne's response, “And therefore born to be rivals”) that would seem integral to the main relationship under the microscope. And yet that exchange doesn't appear in the movie, and Mary and Anne vacillate between games and favors in arbitrary fashion, at least based on what we see on screen. British director Justin Chadwick's television experience evidences itself, in both the best and, more frequently, worst, most constrictive senses of that description.

As Henry VIII, meanwhile, Bana — already too virile to play the fat, in-poor-health king who would die less than a dozen years after the events depicted here — is required to do ridiculous things. There's no sense of independent thought with him, let alone the authoritativeness, capriciousness or vindictiveness associated with King Henry's later years. He seems to exist merely to pull levers of power as directed by Anne, and to a lesser extent Mary. While it's true that the relationship between the Boleyn sisters is extremely interesting, and at the crux of this film, the lack of insight into King Henry is such that it makes for a rather severe isosceles triangle, and is a disservice to the entire story.

Full of the swelling strings, pursed lips and clenched fists that we've come to expect from Masterpiece Theatre, as well as plenty of histrionics, The Other Boleyn Girl plays like a Cliffs Notes version of a master text. There are no significant career lessons to be learned here for Portman (who has a much better natural grasp of the tone of these sorts of period pieces) or Johansson (who has a pout and old-school, pie-faced beauty to suit tales of yore, but not much else). There is a lesson, however, for authors of historical fiction: the literary market may be shrinking in comparison to other forms of entertainment, but if you write it, Hollywood will still come knocking, because there will presumably always be a market of adults who want to catch up on, in quick-bite fashion, the history lessons they slept or passed notes through during their younger years. For the full original review, from FilmStew, click here. (Sony, PG-13, 115 minutes)