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'The Other Boleyn Girl': Sisters, born to be rivals

By Daniel Montgomery

Friday, February 29, 2008

Two years ago, PBS’s Masterpiece Theater aired its miniseries adaptation of Charles Dickens’s ‘Bleak House’. I have not read the novel, but I was struck by the liveliness of the adaptation. The story involved a dreary legal battle, but around it spun a grand soap opera of unforgettable characters, rich performances, and splendid touches of humor befitting characters with names like Guppy and Smallweed. It was a triumph of casting, writing, and directing.

I mention ‘Bleak House’ because one of its two directors, Justin Chadwick, is the director of ‘The Other Boleyn Girl’. Peter Morgan is the screenwriter, working from the novel by Philippa Gregory. He has the special distinction of writing the roles that won Oscars for Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker last year, in ‘The Queen’ and ‘The Last King of Scotland’, respectively. He also wrote ‘Longford’, about the famous British lord who advocated for the impisoned, which premiered last year on HBO. For historical dramas, he’s your man. The subject here is no less than the life and death of Anne Boleyn, famous for getting the axe from King Henry VIII. (If the film is accurate, it’s a sword and not an axe, but who’s counting? Be grateful I avoided a “Heads will roll” joke.)

The film is also about her sister, Mary, the younger and more innocent of the two. The title may refer to either sibling, and in fact, the first we hear the words “the other Boleyn girl,” they’re spoken by Anne, describing herself. (Gregory’s novel is narrated by Mary, but the focus here is slanted towards the more famous sister.) Out of their story, Chadwick and Morgan have made a bodice-ripper of a romance, full of seduction and treachery. On that level, it works, and as it moves towards the end of Anne’s life it works as something more: Anne has connived her way up to royalty, and then discovers it’s a long way down from there.

As in his ‘Bleak House’, Chadwick populates the story with characters of heightened personalities, but mostly doesn’t flatten them into types. I say mostly because for every strong character like Boleyn matriarch Elizabeth (Kristin Scott Thomas), a protofeminist who is wise about a woman’s role in a man’s world and about the fickleness of political favor, there is a character like the conniving Duke of Norfolk (David Morrissey), who works a little too hard at being conniving to be entirely convincing; he reminded me of the manipulative lawyer Tulkinghorn from ‘Bleak House’, played by Charles Dance as a man whose glower could block out the sun. Morrissey is to be forgiven if he is no Charles Dance; if this story had been given the miniseries treatment, and he played a more fully developed role, perhaps Morrissey would have been equal to Dance’s glower.

Strangely, the flattest role is Henry VIII, presented here as a little more than a playboy who thinks with his scepter, drifting from woman to woman at the slightest provocation. He has the attention span of a goldfish and the intelligence of same; according to the film, his sole reason for breaking from the Catholic Church is that Anne won’t put out. I wonder what other affairs of state were neglected while he attended to the pressing concern of his sex life. Henry is played by Eric Bana, an actor of great presence and intensity, but he is put to use only as the irascible prop of a love triangle.

Of the impressive supporting cast, other standouts include Ana Torrent as Catherine of Aragon, Henry’s wife, presented as a woman of dignity who understands what it means when the king appoints a pretty young lady-in-waiting to her service. The scene where she is introduced to Mary is one of Torrent’s best; she is clenched in anger and expresses her displeasure by humiliating the girl. Jim Sturgess (‘Across the Universe’) plays George, the brother of Anne and Mary, as a happy-go-lucky young man who ends up neither happy nor lucky. Benedict Cumberbatch (‘Atonement’) is good in a small role that I wish was larger: He plays Mary’s first husband, William Carey, who because he is powerless against the wishes of the king must obediently allow him to bed his wife. There are poignant reactions early on where Cumberbatch shows us the devoted husband’s anguish, but Henry sends him away from court, and we never hear of him again. This dangling plot thread is troublesome later, when Mary is courted by yet another man. (According to Wikipedia, William died of sweating sickness eight years into their marriage, but for the purpose of this film, he simply ceases to exist.)

The cast is primarily British, but both lead roles are played by distinctly American actresses: Natalie Portman as Anne and Scarlett Johansson as Mary. Portman fares the better of the two, and in fact she fares exceedingly well. She has played a Brit before, in ‘V for Vendetta’, and she seems much more comfortable as Anne than, say, when she played a notable royal with an American accent: Queen Amidala from the ‘Star Wars’ prequels, whose dialogue, to be fair, might only have been delivered convincingly by the automaton that wrote it. As Anne changes from a power-hungry seductress to a queen losing her grip on her husband and her sanity, Portman continually impresses, playing the role like a younger, sexually provocative Lady Macbeth.

Johansson, since her breakthrough performance in ‘Lost in Translation’, has managed to become underrated as an actress. After the screening, I overheard, “She has mastered the vacant stare.” This is the wrong criticism, I think. She has wide, expressive eyes in this film, containing sincerity and a sense of overwhelm at being surrounded by plots and schemes and traitors, even in her own family. What should be criticized is her accent. In 2003, the same year as ‘Lost in Translation’, I remember Johansson playing a character with an accent in Girl with a ‘Pearl Earring’. I have not seen the film since, but remember that it was a successful performance and a convincing accent. But here, as in 2006’s ‘The Prestige’, her accent is strained, going in and out depending on the difficulty of the dialogue. It’s an unfortunate technical distraction that takes away from an otherwise effective performance. (It’s worth noting that I attended a preview screening of a rough cut of this film last year, and Johansson’s part has been noticeably trimmed; perhaps the rest of the test audience agreed with me about the accent, or with my fellow attendee about the stare.)

If I say that ‘The Other Boleyn Girl’ is like a soap opera, that should not be taken as a criticism. It is a smart and elegant soap opera. Its intrigues are, well, intriguing, though like a good soap opera, it might have benefited from being able to stretch its legs out across hours of narrative, to add detail and texture to its intersecting characters, the way ‘Bleak House’ did. The current television series ‘The Tudors’, which airs on the Showtime network and is unrelated to this production, is also about the reign of King Henry VIII. To date, I have not watched it, but I may be inspired to give it a look.