Justin Chadwick, the director of
The Other Boleyn Girl, has only worked in television before and, sadly, you can tell. The movie has things that work better than others, but ultimately it falls down because it cannot find a cinematic way of telling its story. By cinematic here I do not mean visual, as actually the movie is rather nicely shot, albeit on digital. But it needed to find a way to sustain its drama on an emotional level for two hours and it doesnt figure it out; its too episodic, skimming through the historical facts it is (loosely) based on without finding a dramatic thread to hold it together. Four years after it's theatrical release, The Other Boleyn Girl was released on
Blu-ray this week. This may, for all I know, be a problem with Philippa Gregorys popular novel on which it is based, which I have not read. At any rate it is not massively helped by the movies stars. As has become common practice for movies set in Britains past, the leads are American, and the supporting cast British. This has the effect of making the leads look worse, and underlining how good some of the British actors are. That
Natalie Portman, who plays Anne Boleyn, and
Scarlett Johansson, who plays her sister Mary, are American is not really the problem;
Eric Bana, who plays King Henry VIII, is Australian, and rather good in the role. And Portman, who has just picked up an Academy Award for Black Swan, has some very good moments and can be an excellent actress, but the role is written in a way that makes it borderline impossible to play. Johansson, I fear, is simply miscast; she too can be an excellent actress, but she works within a fairly narrow range, and she spends this movie with the look of a deer in the headlights.
The movie takes place in the early 16th century, with the Kings marriage to Catherine of Aragon disintegrating over the fact that she cannot have any more children and he longs for a male heir. It is widely known he is looking for a mistress and Mary (Johansson) is put forward as a candidate. Anne is soon exiled to France for attempting to marry against her familys wishes, and when she meets the king again she is determined to win him from Mary, which she succeeds at, though not necessarily to her benefit. Her change in attitude when she returns is one example of the movie not figuring out how to plausibly sell its narrative shifts; one senses that there is a better movie somewhere in this story, where the audience could really believe in the change she undergoes. The movie is not a complete mess; Bana is fairly well-cast as the king, although he has less screen time than you might think. The supporting cast includes
Kristin Scott Thomas, as the girls mother (good as always although its a fairly thankless role),
David Morrisey, one of the highlights, as the sinister Duke of Norfolk, and
Benedict Cumberbatch as William Carey, Marys first husband. The photography is by
Kieran McGuigan, who is also from TV but may, based on this, have a future as a Director of Photography on other, better movies and has since worked on Love Ranch and Killing Bono. Finally the screenplay is adapted by
Peter Morgan, which is the most baffling aspect of this movie; Morgan has written superb works both for TV (Longford, The Deal) and cinema (The Last King of Scotland, Frost/Nixon, from his own play). The dramatic problems with this script seem so obvious to me that I can only assume, kindly, that what ended up on screen did not reflect what Morgan wrote.
There is nothing wrong with historical dramas of this kind, and some are wonderful (The Lion in Winter springs immediately to mind). They can inspire people to read up on real history (so long as they are prudent enough to take the dramas as fiction). Young girls may have enjoyed some of the drama but the movie deals with subject matter too dark for them, but not in an interesting enough way really to appeal to adults. It also hedges its bets a bit in regards to the subjugation of the women involved; when Kirstin Scott Thomas says her daughters are being bartered for the advancement of men it sounds like a 20th century viewpoint clumsily shoved into a 16th century setting, for political correctness or to help put the audiences mind at rest, or something. At any rate she is spelling out what the audience already knows, and it is one of several examples of the movie not trusting the intelligence of its viewers. The Other Boleyn Girl was released this week
on Blu-ray.