Sweet little Girls become Royal Personages, but how?

Rating: 8/10 (29 January 2011)

The Other Boleyn Girl is not as artsy as Anne of the Thousand Days or The Lion in Winter, which also have their shortcomings. TOBG explores the human side of these historical figures. As much as we might mock dead white men (and women?) they did have hormones, which demonstrably motivate state figures from Helen of Troy and Cleopatra to WJC.
I see Scarlett Johansson more as eye-candy than actress. While she has avoided sex-exploitation films for the most part, I feel she gets so many good roles in Hollywood due to her physical attributes.
Natalie Portman on the other hand, I've liked her in everything I've seen: The Professional, Mars Attacks!, Where the Heart Is, Garden State, V for Vendetta. In TOBG she displays more depth of emotion especially in the gallows scene - I can't recall having seen any done better. Sorry about giving away the ending but it's an historical fact we should all have learned already.
The last half hour of the film covers several years of history. Inserting titles with the date and place would have helped the audience with the scope and provided gravity which professional film critics eat up. There are titles at the end of the film which tell how the characters fared afterward. One or two more foils on the next generation's sweet little girls would have underscored the cruelty and suffering of the period: the Marian Persecutions and Elizabeth's year imprisoned in the Tower of London before she takes the throne.
There are some serious actors in supporting roles: Eric Bana (won the Best Actor at the 2000 Stockholm Film Festival and also the AFI 2000 Best Actor Award), Kristin Scott Thomas (won a 2008 Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for Best Actress of her performance in "Seagull" at the Playhouse), David Morrissey (worked at theatre such as the Manchester Royal Exchange and the National Theatre), Mark Rylance (nominated for a 2003 Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for Best Actor of 2002 for his performance in Twelfth Night)  all references from their IMDb bio's.