Cheap puff that leaves you empty
Freddie Sayers on The Other Boleyn Girl
7 March 2008

Scarlett Johansson stars alongside Natalie Portman and Eric Bana in The Other Boleyn Girl.

Throughout The Other Boleyn Girl I kept thinking of that earlier royal romp Elizabeth. It is now 10 years since Shekhar Kapur's film made a star out of Cate Blanchett, and no one has managed to recapture its magic. It is not for want of trying: Michael Hirst, the writer of Elizabeth, has since been responsible for that television embarrassment The Tudors, as well as last year's dreadful Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

The Other Boleyn Girl, written by Peter Morgan (The Queen) and directed by Justin Chadwick, belongs to the same string of hangers-on. The idea seems to be that if you spend enough on beautiful actresses and costumes, and include enough altitudinous shots of British castles and echoey corridors and stolen kisses behind stone buttresses, the result will equal Elizabeth. Plainly, it doesn't. This film seems like a souped-up made-for-television Hallmark series, condensed into two hours - pretty people, plot twists every five minutes, and lots of cheap puff that leaves you empty. So what is it? Are there rules about what you can and can't do? Let's try some out.

1) "Do not depart from historical fact." Clearly, this rule won't work. Elizabeth showed the young queen having a full-blown romance with Robert Dudley; it hammed up assassination attempts on her life and certainly exaggerated her own agency in government policy. But somehow they were acceptable departures. The Other Boleyn Girl follows the bestselling novel of the same name, and follows the two Boleyn sisters - the dark and calculating Anne and the blonde and innocent Mary - and each of their love affairs with Henry VIII. It is just so reductive: their co-conspiracy in plotting to become the King's mistresses comes too willingly, its purpose as a way of enhancing their father's status spoken of too obviously.

Furthermore, it makes the usual historical drama mistake of rearranging events of history around its own purpose. So the break from the Church becomes the brainchild of Anne Boleyn, and is carried out as a means of allowing Henry to sleep with her. Perhaps we can recast rule number one as follows: "If you are going to depart from historical fact, make sure your story is more interesting than the original."

2) "Don't cast Hollywood celebrities in all the main roles." One or two, maybe. But Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman together is like the battle of the starlets, and the preposterously hunky Eric Bana as Henry VIII is one step too far. Henry VIII all soppy and romantic - with a six-pack? Please.

3) "Don't take it too seriously." This rule is right at the heart of it. We may remember epic pomp from Elizabeth, but in fact the script was playful, with comedy castings such as Eric Cantona as the French ambassador and a masterfully camp performance by Vincent Cassell as Elizabeth's fey suitor, the Duc d'Anjou. The Other Boleyn Girl is relentlessly serious, and the result is melodrama. The decision to run the whole plot within two hours leads to the whole thing speeding up as it goes along, until the time between Anne's marriage to Henry and her execution is compressed into 15 minutes.

4) "Decide who your leading characters are." Elizabeth was a tight, focused look at the early days of Elizabeth's reign - there is almost nobody else in the picture. I can't tell you with confidence who the hero of The Other Boleyn Girl is. Anne (Portman) is the most detailed character (and the best acted, also) but still leaves you wondering how she came to be so ambitious and angry; the King barely opens his mouth, and Mary barely opens hers. Johansson spends much of her short time on screen with the same humble lip-bitten expression, reminding us how nice she is, but then she seems quite happy to cheat on her husband. You are left with a better remembrance of the costumes than the characters in them.

5) Which leads me to my final rule: "Set your moral parameters." This may seem pompous, but actually it is just as crucial to the artistic success of a film. We need to know what the film considers wrong and right, so that we know what to be rooting for. At the start The Other Boleyn Girl seems to have Thomas Boleyn as its moral enemy. He uses his daughters as pawns for his own advancement and, come the end, one of them is dead, the other lonely and disgraced. But oddly the girls don't seem to mind much: they both enter the game of seducing the King with spirit, and Henry becomes the prize that we are rooting for them to achieve. Mary - the nice one, supposedly - sees conceiving an illegitimate child of the King as her idea of bliss. It becomes a cheap game of chick-lit tit-for-tat, no rights and no wrongs.

Not an easy job, then, to write a Tudor costume drama that amounts to more than a bodice-ripper. I hope someone manages soon though - I am not sure I could sit through another one like this.