The Other Boleyn Girl
Rated PG-13 for mature thematic elements, sexual content and some violent images.
reviewed by Christopher Lyon
It's a royal soap opera packed with naked ambition, gauzy sex scenes, and lots of puffy shirts. Oh, and it's English history. Kind of.
The Story
The Boleyn family is running low on funds, but the brothers have a scheme to get them into the royal cash flow: get King Henry (Eric Bana) to have an affair with one of the Boleyn sisters. He's ripe for the picking because his aging wife hasn't given him a male heir. And when Anne (Natalie Portman) fails to attract him, dad and uncle offer up freshly married Mary (Scarlett Johansson) instead. Things are quickly arranged with Mary's new husband (and against Mary's wishes), and the country family is packed off to the glitzy high society world of "court."
The king quickly sweeps Mary off her feet and into his bed while her dad and uncle gleefully plot to use her to make themselves rich. But when Mary gets pregnant, they summon a bitter and manipulative Anne from exile in France to keep the king's interest in the family. Apparently, Anne has been studying the art of evil seduction under the the queen of France (or watching old episodes of "Melrose Place"). She quickly goes to work wooing the king for herself.
Not content to merely have an affair with him, Anne plots to get him to dump his wife and make her the queen -- or no sex! Smitten and grumpy, the king considers altering the course of English history and world religion to make Anne his own.
The Verdict
Is it more or less accurate to turn the immorality and power-grabbing of King Henry's court into something you'd expect to see on E! right after a story on Britney's latest scandal? I don't really know, but director Justin Chadwick and screenwriter Peter Morgan ("The Queen," "The Last King of Scotland") have made the old story feel far less Shakespearean and far more cheap and tawdry.
It certainly looks traditional, filmed on location in old castles, every actor draped with curtain rods full of sumptuous, satiny fabric. In fact, maybe they're all a little overdressed. I felt constantly reminded how BIG the actors' costumes were. Their performances are fine, with Portman standing out as convincingly cold-hearted, sad, and manipulative. But is it just me, or is her voice getting a little more gravelly all the time? Is she a smoker?
Okay, so I wasn't riveted. If you know anything about the history, the action slows down significantly after the first act while you're waiting for the expected events to unfold. And honestly, the whole thing feels icky to me from the start, with the girls getting pimped out to the king by their weak and ruthless dad and uncle. It does serve as a kind of dark morality tale as told by the filmmakers, but it's not a very enjoyable one.
"The Other Boleyn Girl" trims the sex scenes just enough to get a PG-13 rating. Nothing extremely specific is shown, but there's lots of blurry skin and movement in an early scene. Another encounter amounts to a rape scene. The film's conclusion involves the question of whether Anne and her brother have sex or not after we've seen them partly undressed together. Like I said: ick.
Worldview
The storytellers here give us just one hero to root for: poor Mary. Even she is not particularly noble, though she is mostly good-hearted and mind-bogglingly loyal to her wicked family. Still, she submits to her dad and uncle by agreeing to sleep with the king, violating her and his marriage vows. Her mom is the sole voice of morality and reason: Mary is cast aside and the family is ruined just as she predicts.
Everyone else is presented as nearly pure in their evil. Dad, Uncle, Anne, and the king bring the apostle John's definition of worldliness to life on screen: ". . . the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does . . ." (1 John 2:16) Another way to say that might be that worldliness is living for pleasure, possessions, and status -- no matter what it costs you.
But if you're not going to fight for what you really want out of life -- and if you're not willing to step over the lines of right and wrong to get it -- what will keep you from just becoming a victim? What will make your life matter? John said that Christians trust God (instead of their own scheming and strength) to provide what they need, to protect them, to bring them meaning, including a life that will matter forever: "The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever." (1 John 2:18)
Check out James 3:13-18 for more on the difference between the plotting, scheming, taking version of "wisdom" the world offers and the trusting, hoping, obeying version of wisdom God delivers from our future home.
Questions
• How familiar are you with the history behind this story? Did the movie stick with the facts (as far as we know them)?
• Were you surprised the dad and uncle would so easily sell out their daughters' purity and future for a chance at status and wealth?
• Would you say that Anne possessed a kind of "wisdom"? Was there any right motive in her refusal to have sex before she was married to the king?
• In your world, what are the kinds of things people will do to get pleasure, popularity, and cool stuff? What's the real danger of living by the world's system today?
• According to James 3:13-18, what's the different between the "self ambition" form of worldly wisdom and God's brand of wisdom?