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)