Movie Review: The Other Boleyn Girl

The other night Matt and I watched The Other Boleyn Girl--a movie I had been anticipating, since I'm a big fan of Philippa Gregory's books, but with some trepidation, since it had received some fairly unkind reviews. Personally, I thought they were unfounded.

My impression of the movie was that it had beautiful cinematography and, rather than serve as a documentary-style recitation of facts about the Tudor dynasty (which already abound), it instead bit off a respectable summary and turned it into a sumptuous visual and emotional experience. The colors, the clothes, the castles, and the countryside are all the kind of eye candy I was looking for, but I was particularly impressed when it came to the acting. Not expecting much, I was pleasantly surprised at the depth of feeling infused by Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson into their respective roles. Gestures, glances, and other nonverbal expressions were scattered throughout the movie with thrilling abandon. While I originally wondered, like many people, if the roles hadn't been miscast, I found myself believing the voluptuous Scarlett's Mary--at least at first--that all she wanted in life was a quiet place in the country. There were many moments, like when Natalie Portman throws off her headcover and sobbingly submits to the executioner's blade, where you believe that they believe that they really are who they're pretending to be. And that's a satisfying experience.

Of course, the film also serves as a sad commentary on the status of women and marriage in Tudor England. I think this stands out more starkly than in the book because there is less development of character and relationships woven throughout the movie--less to distract you from the fact that these women are pawns, no more. It's always sobering to realize the intensity of suffering that can follow so many people just as a result of who or where they're born. In that sense the whole movie was very sad, which was another thing that surprised me: I had expected at least a few moments of levity, but on the whole, the film was rather dark from beginning to end.

Some have accused that the relationship between the sisters falls flat. I initially thought that myself, but thinking back to the book, I think it was much the same way--rather than getting the feeling of a warm and fuzzy relationship between the sisters, the audience spends much of the time feeling confused. Do they love each other, hate each other? Probably the point we're supposed to get is that Anne and Mary spend much of their time asking themselves those same questions. It isn't a simple relationship, for sure.

I also thought that the supplementary features on the DVD were helpful and interesting, especially those in which both the author and the director commented on the relationship between the book and the film. The director speaks to the fact that adapting a book of 600+pages to a film of reasonable length is so difficult that his mission instead was to lift the spirit of the book into the movie more than actually make the book into a movie. Gregory admits that choosing which she prefers, the book or the movie, "is like saying, which do you love better, your child or someone else's?" but she also notes that after seeing the lavish decor of the film sets, "I understood: that this is what cinema can do." She adds simply, "I felt like I was there." And so did I.