Devoted sisters Anne (Natalie Portman) and Mary (Scarlett Johansson) Boleyn are as close as any pair of siblings could ever be, and on the eve of the younger sister’s wedding the older couldn’t be happier. But after the family’s uncle the Duke of Norfolk (David Morrissey) comes with news of King Henry VIII’s (Eric Bana) failing marriage, their father Sir Thomas (Mark Rylance) sees an opportunity.

Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman in Sony Pictures/Focus Features' The Other Boleyn Girl

Against the wishes of his fearful wife Lady Elizabeth (Kristin Scott Thomas), the pair conspires to place the beautiful and ambitious Anne inside their monarch’s bed. But due to an unfortunate set of circumstances Henry’s eyes instead fall to the recently wed Mary and not to her now quite angry sibling. Summoning the entire family to the Royal Palace, quickly the younger Boleyn finds herself holding the King’s heart inside her palm while the other sister is banished to France due to unspeakable indiscretions outside her station.

When Mary becomes pregnant and is forced into early bed rest, Henry’s attentions begin to wander and a now more confident Anne returns to Court with intentions even her father and uncle know nothing about. Soon she has bewitched the King, convinced him to break with the Roman Church, annul his marriage with barren wife Katherine of Aragon (Ana Torrent) and crown her his Queen instead.

But Anne cannot control everything, and soon her ambition starts to get the better of her causing the young woman to suspect everyone of wanting to do her harm. With Henry growing increasingly impatient at his new wife’s inability to birth a son, a clandestine indiscretion could lead headless ruination. With her sister’s future on the line, Mary returns to London to plead for the Queen’s life, her ability to once touch the royal heart put to the most ultimate of tests.

It’s easy to see why British director Justin Chadwick’s adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s best-selling historical novel The Other Boleyn Girl was delayed from the end of last year to the start of this one. While it has its merits, it still goes without saying that this new period drama just isn’t strong enough to play with the big boys (and a certain teenage girl) of last Fall.

Not to say the film is bad. In fact, the first half of this drama is a rollickingly delicious froth of mayhem and determination just dripping with intrigue, duplicity and sexual carnivorousness. Peter Morgan’s (an Oscar nominee for The Queen) screenplay is wound like a tightly corseted piece of feminine dynamite just waiting for the right moment to explode, and watching all of Anne’s Machiavellian scheming undermine her sister’s happiness (as well as her uncle’s plans) is scrumptiously spellbinding.

It’s when those plans finally come to fruition when things start to go a bit off the rails. Henry remains nothing more than a priggish enigma, dropping this girl for that and then swinging around for the next victim in a pretty frock at almost the drop of a hat. More, things fall apart for Anne in brutish suddenness, everything rapidly swirling to the forgone conclusion (assuming you know a little about European history) so abruptly that by the time it finally got there I almost had to wonder if that was really it.

None of this changes the fact that Portman, an Oscar-nominee for Closer in 2004 (and probably deserving of another, if we critics are to be believed, for V for Vendetta the very next year), is absolutely spectacular. She dives into Anne Boleyn with snidely ominous relish, and watching her worm her way into Henry’s heart while twisting the dagger of duplicitous betrayal into her sister Mary’s is an absolute display of carnal mysticism that’s wickedly divine. The actress reminds us why we were so bewitched by her in Luc Besson’s The Professional, just a flicker of her crooked smile enough to make me apprehensively anxious and giddily invigorated and it is no wonder the king of all England finds himself feeling the very same way.

I wish the same could be said for Bana and Johansson. Both are fine actors (Ghost World is one of the great achievements of this millennium, while the former’s tortured presence in Troy was probably the only reason to keep watching that massively overblown Brad Pitt monstrosity) but they are wasted here. Johansson never connects with Mary, never gets us to understand how she could fall so completely for this shrill brute of a man. Bana meanwhile has virtually nothing to play, and while he does get to showcase glimpses of his brooding charisma and innate unbridled masculine sexiness not near enough of it shows through all the one-dimensional melodrama to make this performance anything close to interesting.

Chadwick comes from the BBC, most notably helming multiple episodes of their outstanding adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House in 2005, and I think in this case that is both blessing and curse. Blessing because the director never lets the spectacle of the situations or the setting overwhelm the story, doing everything he can to make sure the characters stay front and center. Curse because he is so obviously trying to get out of the television box, speeding up the action and pushing the momentum ultimately too far past its breaking point. 

You can’t help but watch The Other Boleyn Girl and realize both Chadwick and Morgan probably viewed both of Shekhar Kapur Elizabeth spectacles while furiously taking copious amounts of notes. Unfortunately they’ve picked up too many facets of the brutally misguided sequel and not enough from the exhilaratingly sublime original. Like Anne, it is as if the pair’s ambition has gotten the better of them, and for all their strengths as filmmakers it’s the hurriedly chaotic storytelling which ultimately slices this film’s jugular to bloodily exasperated smithereens.

Film Rating: êê1/2 (out of 4)

- Review reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle

Additional Links:

-  The Other Boleyn Girl Theatrical Trailer