The Other Boleyn Girl
1 Waffles!

They should just chop everyone’s head off in the first ten minutes and be done with it.

Kind of based on the true story in the early 1500’s, Scarlett Johansson stars as Mary Boleyn – the youngest daughter in a politically ambitious aristocratic family. She recently has been married and hopes to live a quiet country life of some privilege, but her father, Thomas (Mark Rylance, sporting the world’s worst fake beard), wants more for all of them.

King Henry VIII (Eric Bana) starts to have a wandering eye soon after the Queen (Ana Torrent) cannot bear him a son, so the Boleyn family, lead by the Duke of Norfolk (David Morrissey), arranges for his royal highness to make a visit and be wooed by Mary’s sister, Anne (Natalie Portman). While Henry is wooed, it is unintentionally so by Mary, leading to the Boleyn family being summoned to the royal court, so Henry can have Mary nearby to fulfill his whims and desires.

Is Mary willing to be the King’s concubine?

Will Anne, the more conniving of the two, stand for being passed over?

The Other Boleyn Girl plays out like a second rate melodramatic 1980’s soap opera. The cast desperately tries to play it straight, take it seriously and believe in the material, but the movie is too cold, stiff and ridiculous for the audience to take it seriously. Quite to the contrary, The Other Boleyn Girl has so many overwrought situations and weak dialogue that it had almost as many laughs as the Will Ferrell comedy, Semi-Pro.

Worst of all, writer Peter Morgan (based on the novel by Philippa Gregory) and director Justin Chadwick wrongly try to make some sort of hero out of Mary, so the audience can be presented with a conventional movie, but there are no heroes in this tale whether we are discussing the true story or the one up on the screen. Instead of embracing the evilness and dastardly nature of every character, Morgan and Chadwick castrate the movie. They need to free the cast to have much more emotion and anger to match the madness of these people who are pre-occupied with status and power. These are people with horrible flaws, but that can be a compelling movie if the director and writer embrace it.

Someone needs to tell Chadwick you have to rely on more than fancy costumes to make a period piece interesting. The story never goes beyond the surface of any character, and I am so confused as to why the real story, which is quite shocking on its own, needed to be changed. The alterations don’t make it more compelling.

The Other Boleyn Girl is rated PG-13 for mature thematic elements, sexual content and some violent images