Mother knows best in 'The Other Boleyn Girl'

(C-) That daring brunet minx Anne Boleyn ( Natalie Portman) tells her virtuous blond sister Mary ( Scarlett Johansson) that love is meaningless without position and power. Anne learns the opposite is true in The Other Boleyn Girl.

This rendering of the turbulent second marriage of England's King Henry VIII ( Eric Bana) proves too heavy-footed for the old movie two-step of setting up a morality tale, then exploiting it for heat and titillation.

A risky, flirtatious dance begins when the women's uncle, the Duke of Norfolk (David Morrissey), clomps onto the Boleyn estate with news that Henry's marriage has soured because Queen Catherine hasn't given him a male heir. Norfolk and the women's father, Thomas (Mark Rylance), scheme to put Anne in the royal bed -- and when that doesn't work, Mary, even though she's married.

All goes well until pregnancy sequesters Mary, and Anne, seizing on a second chance to win Henry for herself, overplays her hand. She succeeds in forcing him to divorce Catherine of Aragon (Ana Torrent), but she also curdles Henry's desire for her into a terrible love-hate.

Loosely adapting Philippa Gregory's best-selling novel, the screenwriter, Peter Morgan (The Queen), probably wanted to create surging romantic melodrama with black-comic undertones. It should be mind-boggling and hilarious to see Anne's scheming and Henry's matrimonial turmoil lead him to build a transformational regime that breaks away from the Roman Catholic Church and undercuts the power of feudal lords.

Thomas Boleyn's infinite callousness -- and Anne's deviousness in twisting her father's cunning to her own ends -- should have stitched a thread of almost-farcical tension into the high-court soap opera.

But the director, Justin Chadwick, goes in for thick and heavy emotions -- glances that should dart around a royal dais instead land like bombshells, with fun becoming the collateral damage.

Johansson personifies strained innocence, Portman embodies erotic covetousness and Bana is all manly confusion. The only one with any stature as a character is the women's mother, Lady Elizabeth. Kristin Scott Thomas turns her into a font of feminist wisdom without becoming a strident scold.

Lady Elizabeth asks the right questions: When did ambition become a virtue? Why do parents turn children into commodities -- not just daughters, but a son such as George (Jim Sturgess), married off to a woman he despises?

Early on, when Thomas exiles Anne to the French court for fumbling her first chance with Henry, Lady Elizabeth counsels her to learn the Parisiennes' lesson of making a man do a woman's bidding while believing he's the one in charge. Lady Elizabeth is a moral character; she even married Thomas for love (though Rylance's one-note performance makes you wonder how that was ever possible.) Anne would have done better if she followed her mother's advice even while descending deeper into amorality.

Thomas, a bitterly underused performer in recent years (her best recent showcase: the 2006 Francis Veber comedy The Valet), brings her role a seasoned emotional authority that's bracing amid these febrile goings-on. But the filmmakers don't seem to realize that she's the voice of their movie. Unlike every other character left standing, Lady Elizabeth doesn't rate a closing portrait with an underlining crawl to let us know when and how she died.

>>>The Other Boleyn Girl ( Columbia Pictures) Starring Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Eric Bana. Directed by Justin Chadwick. Rated PG-13 for sexual content and violence. Time 114 minutes.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com

Related topic galleries: Family, Kristin Scott Thomas, Norfolk (Norfolk, Virginia), Anne Boleyn, Scarlett Johansson, Christianity, Natalie Portman

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