THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL
Directed by Justin Chadwick. Starring Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Eric Bana. Opens Fri, Feb 29.
3 Stars

The Other Boleyn Girl is pretty much what it appears to be: a quasi-historical costume melodrama of dubious literary extraction starring a pair of quasi-legit movie starlets who look great together on the marquee. The puffy lips and pale loveliness of Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson’s combined female starpower practically attacks you from the poster—which, to be frank, promises a lot more upswept pre-Elizabethan décolletage than it delivers.

Besides universal veneration of their youthful beauty, Portman and Johansson share a propensity for both arthouse quirkiness and prestige trash, so it’s impossible to guess ahead of time how the movie will deal with Philippa Gregory’s fictionalized account of sisters Anne and Mary Boleyn, never mind how they’ll reckon with the English accents they’ll be forced to adopt. (As it turns out, they’re barely distracting at all, with only the odd “en-chawnt-ed” sticking out here and there.) Will The Other Boleyn Girl be a middlebrow success like Johansson’s Girl With a Pearl Earring, or a costume-epic disaster like Portman’s Goya’s Ghosts?

Gregory’s novel riffs on the historical fact that younger sister Mary was the mistress of King Henry VIII (1491-1547) before he severed England’s ties with the Vatican and established the Church of England to make Anne Boleyn his queen. Anne’s daughter Elizabeth I assumed Henry’s throne, but some versions have it that Mary illegitimately bore the king’s first male heir.

In the movie version, the vain, hot-blooded Henry Tudor (Eric Bana) has the temptation of ripe, precocious Anne (Natalie Portman) thrust under his nose by her scheming uncle (David Morrissey) and spineless father (Mark Rylance) to serve their own ambitions. Henry nibbles, but it’s the fair Mary (Scarlett Johansson) who attracts him and who is called to court when Henry’s interest wanes in his barren Spanish queen Catherine of Aragon (Ana Torrent). Sibling rivalry rages as each sister vies for the fatally short-lived attentions of the king at a steep cost to the entire Boleyn family, including stoic mother Elizabeth (Kristin Scott Thomas). 

The Other Boleyn Girl starts slow and talky, picks up a bit of steam as Anne plots to supplant Mary in the king’s affections, hurtles past the fallout of her actions, then ends the only way it can according to history. Eventually it achieves a certain entertaining velocity with the accumulation of period stage dressing, facial acting, and condensed ’n’ abridged historical details, even if the entertainment value is at odds with any claim the movie has to artistic seriousness. 

Maybe there’s just something too self-conscious about the whole affair, from the arty framing and swollen score to the weird post-production veneer of murk and overlit steeliness that at times makes everything look computer-generated. 

What’s more, director Justin Chadwick seems to be making up for a sluggish opening by glossing over significant plot points like Henry’s decision to break with Rome and make himself the head of the church. That these momentous turns of events all get blurted out in dialogue between the scheming and weeping tends to reduce them to mere soap opera, especially when the film gives us no sense of what the world is like outside the king’s chambers. 

The luminous leading ladies get by pretty well on what they’re given to work with—though Portman’s gesticulations make her pendant jewelry flutter constantly—but it’s the underused backline of Kristin Scott Thomas and Ana Torrent that conveys a real sense of strength and nobility. Bana makes what he can of his brooding intensity in a role that never gives him a chance to be regal, but merely capricious in matters concerning the royal wang. He is, however, marvelously upholstered.

It’s Anne Boleyn who gets shortest shrift in her translation to the screen, though, her contributions to Britain’s religious and political destiny the apparent unintended side effect of royal prick-teasing and ambition. But it’s probably no surprise to anyone that in a movie like The Other Boleyn Girl, teary melodrama trumps history every time.