A fine example of a movie that's good, not great.

Rating: 6/10 (16 June 2011)

This soapy melodrama won't make anyone forget A Man for All Seasons or Anne of The Thousand Days, but it's well made, quite watchable and brings a new perspective to the story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.
That story should be familiar to most people. The king of England and his Spanish queen Katherine could not have a son. Tormented by his lack of a heir and what that would mean to the future of his kingdom, Henry fell under the spell of a young woman named Anne Boleyn. Unlike his other extramarital conquests, Anne refused Henry's affections until he was so consumed with lust for her that Henry cast off the Catholic Church and founded his own Church of England so he could divorce Katherine and marry Anne. But while her brains and her ambition made her queen of England, Anne's body betrayed her. She could not give Henry a son and learned that once Henry VIII got in the habit of replacing wives, it was hard for him to stop.
What this film brings to the tale is the fact that Anne wasn't the only Boleyn girl that caught Henry's eye. She had a sister named Mary and this movie supposes that it is she who first enchanted and bedded the king, even giving him a bastard son, before Anne was finally able to sink her claws into Henry.
The Other Boleyn Girl also emphasizes some of the brutal, practical realities of King Henry's English society, a world where grasping men sacrifice their wives and their children in their schemes for power and fortune. It is also a world where women, even the most capable or powerful, live with a pervasive oppression. They had no standing or rights that couldn't be taken away from them by their father or their husband.
The best things about this movie are, quite appropriately, Natalie Portman as Anne and Scarlett Johansson as her sister Mary. Portman handles her more flamboyant role with aplomb, combining fury, cunning and fragility in equal measures. Johansson gives a dignity and purity to the simpler, more ordinary and yet stronger Boleyn sister. David Morrissey is almost as good as the cold and calculating Duke of Norfolk, who is the first one to propose tempting Henry with Anne. Mark Rylance is also wonderful at portraying the pitiful weakness of Anne and Mary's father, while Kristin Scott Thomas as their mother and Ana Torrent as Queen Katherine are perfect as strong women bound down by the social order of their day. Eric Bana does everything he can with a poorly written Henry VIII. It's like these filmmakers never knew what to make of the English king, so the character just sort of alternates between being consumed by lust, vexed by fears for the future, yearning for normality and driven by unyielding pride. Bana pulls it all off well, but it doesn't add up to a complete and believable person.
Now, the film does take more than a few historical liberties and the direction of Justin Chadwick is never comfortable with the pomp and pageantry of a royal court. The story might also have benefited from being more focused and a little less ambitious, which is more of a backhanded compliment than a criticism. Dispensing with the melodramatic soap opera and concentrating on the gender and social mores that pushed women like Anne and Mary to do and consent to terrible things might have produced a much sharper and more provocative movie.
But you can't fault a good film for not being great. I like The Other Boleyn Girl and recommend it as a period piece that brings just enough modern sensibility to one of the great stories in history, breathing a little new life into the old yarn.