Word: boleyn
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...Boleyn for Calumny...
...movies. The Other Boleyn Girl is based on the Philippa Gregory novel that wove the melodrama of Henry's rule into a bodice-ripping yarn. Not that the known facts aren't salacious enough: the King's impatience with his wife, Catherine of Aragon, in providing him with a male heir; his divorce of Catherine to marry Anne; his break with the Pope over the divorce and his establishment of the Anglican Communion as his own personal church. With all this as backdrop, Gregory foregrounded scenes of calumny and chicanery, of paternal pimping and near-incest, to create an international...
...small. No question that Portman's and Johansson's faces merit microscopic attention, but the film has a cramped feeling that turns every urgent, conspiratorial confidence into an italicized shout. That's a shame, because the movie has some excellent supporting skullduggery by Mark Rylance as the Boleyn girls' father, as well as a truly imperious turn by Kristin Scott Thomas as their mother. (She also played Johansson's mother in The Horse Whisperer...
...than a pay-TV romp à la The Tudors, it never leaves you in doubt that noble sentiment will win out over sexual intrigue, that hanky will trump panky. The resulting melange isn't awful, but you'll be forgiven if you wait for the DVDs of The Other Boleyn Girl - this one and the TV movie - for a leisurely home-viewing to compare and contrast...
...That leaves Portman, who has looked stranded in some movies (her turn in The Phantom Menace was especially unfortunate), totally in control in others (do we thank Portman or Mike Nichols for her work in Closer?). It's odd that she plays the wanton Boleyn sister, and Johansson the more demure one, since there's always been a reticence to Portman, the need not to be mistaken for a naughty girl - as if she doesn't realize that the best parts for women are bad girls. She holds back here too, in a part that demands that the stays...