Dorkgasm Gonzo Is God

Long Live the Queen
By
Michael C. Riedlinger
Editor-In-Chief

            Justin Chadwick’s adaptation of Phillipa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl is remarkably beautiful. The sets are spot on for the period, the costumes regal and breathtaking. Not a single member of the cast reminds us of a bad weekend at the renaissance fair. This is a consummate period drama, retelling the story of Anne Boleyn from a more familial perspective, but it still falls flat.

            For one, the performances seem stale. Natalie Portman portrays Anne much as she portrays smitten young women in other films going all the way back to Beautiful Girls. Only briefly, after Anne returns from France and seeks to woo the King, does she come across effectively as someone who could change an entire kingdom. The conniving does her character well and allows Portman to add depth to her performance. Scarlet Johansen phones in her performance as well as Anne’s sister Mary, forgotten by popular history but certainly integral to the story of how England split from Rome. Johansen’s performance is slightly better, but the character is not much more than a side note still, though written as a caring, loving sister. She is more a foil to show us the degradation of first the men in these girl’s lives, and then Anne herself.

            The story, for those unfamiliar with it, follows Anne Boleyn and her baby sister Mary as they seek King Henry VIII’s favor at the behest of their slime-ball uncle. Mary wins it first, gives birth to a child, but Henry is seduced in the interim by Anne. Anne convinces him to split from the Catholic Church, divorce his wife, Katherine of Aragon, and marry her instead. When she fails to produce a male heir (she gives birth to the future Queen Elizabeth instead), she is tried for treason and beheaded. Yes, we know the story going in, but that should not stop any director, even a first-timer like Chadwick, from trying to show us some dramatic tension anyway.

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            As it stands, the only real tension presented to us is from Katherine, when she confronts Henry and the court as they attempt to exile her. When she demands to be tried before the Pope, there is a real sense of apprehension present. We know how that gambit plays out, but the performance still makes us pause and worry about the monkey wrench she has just thrown in Anne’s plans. Eric Bana is two-dimensional as the King, and the only truly solid performance comes from Ana Torrent as his Spanish Queen. Sadly, had Torrent been in the film more it would only have served to make everyone else look worse. It is almost as though the characters know just as well as we do that all of what will occur is a forgone conclusion. It comes across as pretty people in pretty garb just reading lines.

            Character development often occurs off-screen in this film as well. One minute Anne is a forthright tart, and the next she has returned from France a sophisticated one. Henry wanders from set to set a smitten sod until, all of a sudden, he is fed up with Anne and just bends her over a desk. There is no regality to their demeanors, and this I think could become a point of contention for viewers.

            On the one hand, Chadwick presents these people as regular people, with regular-ish problems. I have not read The Other Boleyn Girl, so I do not know if that is part of the charm of the book. I can say, however, that on film it makes for rather boring going. Anne’s coronation, the goal she has been working toward half the film, takes up perhaps thirty seconds. More time is spent, instead, on her freaking out about having a baby boy. Maybe that take on the matter is refreshing for some, but we cannot forget that we are still in a story about Kings and Queens and nobles here. For me, without that, much of this film came across as a 16th Century fashion show with performances as thin as paper dolls.