Ask people what they know about Henry VIII, and you’ll hear one thing: he killed his wives.
People more interested in history will also tell you about his divorce of his first wife, his splitting with the Catholic church, and his major impact on world history because of those two splits, but most people at least know that Henry VIII killed his wives.
In The Other Boleyn Girl, starring Scarlett Johansson as Mary Boleyn and Natalie Portman as Anne Boleyn, director Justin Chadwick attempts to explore the earlier parts of Henry’s reign. This is before Jane Seymour, before his second and third Catherines, and before he’d begun beheading people because things weren’t going his way.
Eric Bana plays the king, and he does well. Johansson plays the kindhearted Mary Boleyn well, while Portman is at once endearing and conniving. You want to like her because she is strong and unwilling to be trampled, but she’s also self-centered and self-serving. Her fate, though, is still tragic, and her final monologue is excellent.
The story follows Mary and Anne as they are ordered through their lives by the men around them — their father, their uncle, their husbands, and more. It’s upsetting to see them traded as commodities, which is basically how the men in their lives see them. Even Henry VIII, who is either in love with or infatuated by each of them from time to time, is shown as loving them only because they are what he can or cannot have.
Mary is the first sister to become the mistress of the king, who is being driven to desperation by his wife’s inability to give him a male heir. Anne only becomes the mistress of the king later, after she manipulates her way into a better place. This works for and against her.
I liked that the film didn’t try to hard to make you love or hate any of the characters. It did well to show them as human enough that you care for them, but it also showed that they were flawed. Some more than others.
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