The Other Boleyn Girl: Rating: 1.5 stars

The infamous Anne Boleyn (Natalie Portman) connives her way to the throne, destroying anything who gets in her way — including her younger sister, Mary (Scarlett Johansson).

The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)
2008 · PG-13 · Drama
Reviewed July 2, 2009

I am not a fan of Philippa Gregory. I find her writing trite, silly, and predictable — right down to the incest, a plot point which no longer counts as a twist considering how frequently her characters resort to it. The Other Boleyn Girl is no exception to my view; it's a silly, frilly read, and not even a very fun or original one at that.

The movie may have drifted away from the book on other points, but the dullness was kept in. The story of Mary Boleyn's rise and fall as Henry's mistress — a historical fact that, for most people, will be less familiar than her sister Anne's meteoric career — is frankly not that interesting anyway, and even less interesting with Gregory's angelic characterization of the woman. Scarlett Johansson blinks and stutters her way into Henry's bed and out of it, while Natalie Portman's would-be smolder fizzles like a rained-on campfire, leaving you wondering why Henry wants either of them. Eric Bana, the great Hal himself, storms about looking silly in his giant clothes and occasionally punishing an uppity female with his penal statutes (heh). Mary Rylance (Daddy Boleyn) hovers in the background looking like a worried hedgehog in a silly hat, while Kristen Scott Thomas (the Boleyn mother) spouts a weary feminism so ridiculously anachronistic that you keep waiting for one of the men to intone, "Begone, woman, and do not return until five hundred years hence!" And meanwhile the plot plods wearily through its paces, leaving out minor details here and there as though too bored with itself to bother.

It's virtually impossible to spoil the ending, since we all know what happened to Anne Boleyn. Well, all of us except sister Mary, who gets a hilarious moment at the end where she thinks she's watching Anne walk to freedom when actually she's walking onto a scaffold. You would think someone of that execution-happy era would cotton on to these things a bit faster, but no; it takes Mary a good several minutes to get worried, and then it takes a letter from the king to really drive it home. I will say this, though: they got the execution right. It's a pet peeve of mine when screen-Annes kneel at a block to get their heads lopped off with an axe, rather than the more accurate — and, reputedly, less painful — scenario, where Anne knelt upright and was separated from her head via sword. And yet, why did the movie suddenly bother to be historically accurate after two hours of fiction? Were they trying to appeal to nitpickers like me? For once, I'd rather have had a good story than straight facts — but sadly, I got neither.