Movie Review: The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)

With the critical failures of The Other Boleyn Girl and Elizabeth: The Golden Age, I hope studios have moved on from the idea that dressing up actors in period garb and having them speak in high culture accents is enough to make it seem like art. Because as this movie proves (as The Golden Age did before it), paying more attention to costume and set design than story is no more artful than is paying more attention to explosions and CGI.

Other than attention to period details and postcard perfect visuals of historical settings, there's nothing else to recommend about The Other Boleyn Girl. There isn't much to praise or critique the performers for, as they are saddled with empty, exposition-heavy dialogue and are mostly treated as set pieces as the movie strains to keep the plot moving through several years of Tudor history. At the same time, none of them do anything to elevate the movie by their performances, so they aren't entirely blameless for its failings. For the most part, the young cast of Natalie Portman as Anne Boleyn, Scarlett Johansson as her sister Mary, and Eric Bana as the object of their rivalry, King Henry VIII are treated like everything else in the movie: gorgeous scenery put through its paces by director Justin Chadwick. None were particularly interesting as characters, but all were nice to look at.

Beyond being the latest example of staid period pieces about royalty, The Other Boleyn Girl is a great example of how longer books make for bad movie adaptations (paperback editions of the book reach over 700 pages). Such lengths don't fit well into the two or so hours generally allotted to film (the movie isn't particularly long at 115 minutes), so the books are usually stripped down to mere plot developments for the script, rushing along from plot point to plot point with the extras either left out or presented as mere exposition. The problem is that unless a story is particularly plot driven, the film comes off as flavourless and disaffecting.

Article Author: Andy Sayers

Andy Sayers is a technical writer from Canada, which automatically makes him funnier than people from other countries. When not writing about pop culture, he is consuming it alongside his loving wife.

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