Starring Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson. Written by Peter Morgan
from the novel by Philippa Gregory. Directed by Justin Chadwick. (14A)
114 min. Opens Feb 29.
Though it may play fast and loose with history, this costume drama about romantic intrigues in the court of Henry VIII is itself neither fast nor loose. In other words, The Other Boleyn Girl is a bodice ripper with very little bodice-ripping, the film being too chaste, pretty and torpid to allow the tale’s currents of lust and jealousy to generate much heat. Veteran BBC director Justin Chadwick may largely eschew the overwrought flash that made Elizabeth: The Golden Age so unintentionally hilarious but neither does he present Philippa Gregory’s spuriously soft-feminist version of events (adapted here by The Queen scribe Peter Morgan) with any great zest.
Likewise, the lead actors too often seem buried under layers of expensive fabric. Natalie Portman is irritatingly shrill as Anne Boleyn, the strident cocktease who gets the king so wound up, he has no choice but to invent the Anglican Church. As Henry VIII, Eric Bana spends most of his time glowering into the mid-distance. Scarlett Johansson fares better as Anne’s sister Mary, a delicate example of 16th-century girlhood who’s shocked to be — in the acerbic words of Kristin Scott-Thomas as Ma Boleyn — “treated like cattle for the advancement and amusement of men.” Even so, there’s little amusing, urgent or tragic about The Other Boleyn Girl’s increasingly enervating procession of courtier confabs, regal rogering and historically inaccurate hissy fits. Off with all of their heads, I say.