I usually expect revisionist history (or historical fiction) that purports to show the women’s side of things to have a rough time of it, for the simple fact that quite often the women had a rough time of it. A story of the Boleyn sisters isn’t going to end well—we all know what happened to Anne Boleyn.
But still, I would assume that the film would attempt to take some sort of a feminist tack, right?
I’d be wrong in this case. (Spoilers below)
The Other Boleyn Girl does little to change the common portrayal of Anne Boleyn as a scheming, vicious, cruel girl willing to cut any throat to get what she wanted. Even casting a capable and compelling actress like Natalie Portman doesn’t help. Anne is held responsible in this version not only for stealing King Henry away from his rightful queen, but now also her own sister. She is punished for choosing her own men, forced to divorce one and then raped and finally beheaded by the other, and is shown practically raping her own brother (one of the trumped-up charges leveled against her to excuse her beheading and Henry’s next marriage). Even her choice to ride her own horse to the hunt brings scandal, as the king’s attempt to follow her leads to his accident—which leads him to Mary’s bed.
Every attempt Anne makes to gain her freedom results in disaster, which is seen as contributing to her end. Where Sofia Coppola’s sympathetic examination of Marie Antoinette delves into Marie’s pleasures and tiny rebellions, allowing her sensual exploration and pointedly ending the film before her death, director Justin Chadwick and writer Peter Morgan seem to enjoy punishing Anne over and over again, skimming over any part of the story where she might have pleasure and showing only the pain. From before she is crowned, her life is shown as miserable, punishing her for getting what she wanted.
Meanwhile, her sister Mary, played by Scarlett Johansson, is pure and submissive to her father’s demands, and properly gives herself to Henry not just because she is ordered to do so (despite her own previous marriage) but because she “loves him.” To compound all of her perfections, she alone gives the king a son, though he is an illegitimate son that he cannot recognize and pass the throne on to. Mary is so saintly that even when her sister betrays her and steals her man (because we all know that’s how it goes) she lies for her to the king, allowing Anne to have what she wants. When Anne’s downfall is imminent, we see Mary several times riding in haste to her sister’s aid, despite all we’ve been shown of Anne’s lack of deserving of it.
Saint Mary gets to have her sensual pleasure only with the king, in lavishly shot scenes of lovemaking in which he is “tender” and of course we are to understand that the two of them have some deep love that he never expresses, because he’s seduced away from her by her wicked sister. Even though Mary is married, it’s OK for her to sleep with the king because she gets permission from her father and her husband, who are both quite willing to sell her for position.
The film could have spent more time tackling the issue of the women being sold and traded. Kristen Scott Thomas, as their mother, is the only voice for the girls, but she is allowed far too few scenes (especially for such a great actress. There are too few parts for aging beautiful women.). The movie is far more concerned with the girls, and while the fact that they are allowed agency is a nice thought, it also means they are punished for actions that they were historically forced into. Mary is complicit in turning her sister in when she marries the man she chooses, and Anne is complicit in, well, everything bad that happens.
Her rape leads into her asking her sister how he was, and the answer? “He was tender”–the implication being that Anne must have brought on his violence, not been the undeserving victim of it. And the next scene? Her wedding to the king, and her coronation. The implication of causality is clear: she got what she wanted when she gave the king what he wanted. And then from there on each scene is misery–childbirth, “a girl” (which of course is not the desired heir), seeing the king with others, raving and ranting, insisting that “it’s my fault” (and cutting away from her before someone can argue the point), miscarriage, begging her brother to sleep with her and then doing so, and then her trial and execution.
And at the end of all of this, Mary is allowed to marry another man, one we’ve seen loves her, and to live a happy pastoral existence raising her kids—because that’s all women are supposed to want, right? Mary repeatedly chides Anne for “reaching too high,” for daring to want to marry who she wants, and then for daring to want the king to marry her instead of making her his new mistress, to be cast off when she is pregnant or when she bores him.
The choice of actors in a film is a piece of the puzzle that cannot be ignored. Scarlett Johansson is often thought of as the temptress, particularly in her offscreen manner, but on camera she is as well known for her innocent Girl With a Pearl Earring as for Nola in Match Point. Natalie Portman got her start as a child actress in The Professional, and has nearly always played the wise-beyond-her-years type, though the seductress here is rather new for her. The two girls look nothing like sisters, and this must have been done to draw the line even clearer between the dark-haired Anne and the golden Mary (yet again, saintly).
Eric Bana plays Henry VIII as a fickle bear of a man, burly and animalistic, made even larger than his bearing by sumptuous, giant costumes—only Mary gets him stripped down, in a very obvious visual metaphor. Bana is a very talented actor, and here his eyes do most of the telling—even with Mary they flicker and belie his pretty promises. He is spoiled and used to getting whatever he wants, and his demeanor is much like Colin Firth’s in the aforementioned Girl With a Pearl Earring. He looks like a deer in headlights half the time, like he’s knocked sideways by the Boleyn sisters (and perhaps not responsible for his actions?)
Anne’s religion is portrayed merely as a ploy to get to the king, not the sincere belief that most historians consider it. Almost nothing is made of the Protestant reformation sweeping Europe at the time, and changing the church is seen as simply a whim of the king.
The movie takes great pains to note that Anne was NOT a virgin when she held out for marriage from the king, but virginity is not what is prized here anyway–it is sex with permission from men. Anne has the classic double bind–she is punished for having sex of her own choosing, and then she is punished for refusing to submit to sex when she doesn’t want it (whatever ignoble motives the movie has already attributed to her). And the final crime that brings her down? Choosing sex and breaking the worst taboo–incest. Sex with her own brother. And let us not forget that in this version of the story, it is her brother’s wife–another sister, though just a sister-in-law–who tells tales to the king and gets her killed. Saint Mary is the only good sister.
I was addicted to The Tudors on Showtime when I could still afford fancy cable. It wasn’t any more historically accurate than this (probably less so) but at least it allowed Anne a personality, development, thoughts, feelings, changes. I couldn’t say that it was a feminist show (when the king’s sister died a horrible, disgusting death after choosing her own husband–though it did at least allow her some love and pleasure before making her miserable again–and most pointedly, the miserable death was the historical anomaly here) but it did allow the female characters to be real people. Bodice-ripping, lustful ones, but oh well.
I would’ve been happy if that’s all this film was.
No writer or filmmaker can make Anne Boleyn not die on a scaffold with her head rolling away from her. That’s the central story and the central tragedy. But Anne Boleyn’s tragedy need not be painted as all her own fault. A sympathetic writer (I haven’t read the book, so I am not going to blame Philippa Gregory for this, as the changes could well be in the adaptation) could have portrayed Anne as a more complicated person, with desires other than just those for a man, position, and revenge. It could have focused on her struggles, shown her growing or changing. Instead, this film ultimately gives us two characters who do not change. Mary is perfect, yielding to whomever issues an order, accepting of her “place.” Anne is too libidinous, too active, too rebellious, and though at the end she issues a tearful apology from the scaffolding, not a bit of her character development rings true.
You know, this is interesting because I’ve read the book but haven’t seen the movie. To me, the book was more about the Bolyn family’s lust for power, and how it drove the girl’s parents to use their own daughters and manipulate them into dangerous situations with the hopes of gaining a leg up in court. In the book, both girls were used as pawns to get into henry’s bed and thus thrust the Bolyn family into an influential position. To the parents it didn’t really matter which girl it was as long as one of them got there. When mary was no longer capturing the king’s interest she was simply swapped out for Anne. Anne was simply better at getting what she wanted, and more willing to put her personal feelings or any fleeting thoughts about morality aside in order to gain power. That’s why she was so “hated’ in the book. In Phillipa Gregory’s world the parents got a worse rap than the kids.
The book left me not with some lame, reinforced notion of the madonna/whore sterotype, but with the impression that power is a corrupting force and court at this time was a dangerous place for anyone who wasn’t interested in playihng games to get ahead. I’m sorry that the film didn’t delve deeper into this dynamic.
Despite everything that you say is wrong with this, sucker that I am, I have to rent the movie. What happened to Anne was a terrible thing and I do believe that she has been wrongly targeted by history. It is her gender more than anything else that made her a victim. I often wonder why so little is said about Henry’s clearly psychopathic nature. I man that kills women they way that he did was clearly not a lover of them.
I’m afraid I’ve neither read the book nor seen the film nor watched The Tudors, and probably never will, mostly because I can’t stand this sort of populist history.
Fortunately, I *have* read several good non-fiction accounts of Anne’s life that portayed her as a strong woman who knew her own mind (e.g. Antonia Fraser’s “The Wives of Henry VIII”). As Renee says above, she was a victim of her family’s power plays, but we must remember that our idea of “victim” in this case simply did not exist at the time…most, if not all, marriages amongst the nobility and royalty were made for power/wealth/family connections, certainly not love. That was the norm, and it was accepted as such. They didn’t really think about it the way we do now.
Anne knew exactly what she was about, she held Henry off until he could promise her marriage (she refused to be his mistress, saying she was too good to be so, and Mary was actually old news by then anyway), which, of course, led to the king’s “Great Matter” (his divorce from Katherine of Aragon).
If Anne was a victim of anything, it was the sad fact that she didn’t bear Henry a living son (which may have been his “fault” in any case), which was his paramount desire, and informed his subsequent actions, not her gender. Not being able or willing by that time to go through another protracted divorce, trumped-up and outlandish charges were levelled at her, she was found guilty in a kangaroo court (although she was allowed to speak on her own behalf…tragic Katherine Howard was not, in large measure because the court didn’t want a repeat of Anne’s eloquence), and finally eliminated. Of course, by that time Henry had already become enamoured of Jane Seymour, Anne’s character opposite and one of her former ladies-in-waiting (as Anne had been to Katherine).
The personal history of Henry VIII has several strong women who made smart choices for the right reasons, insofar as they could in 16th century England — one princess famously stated that she would only consider Henry’s suit if she had two necks! Katherine of Aragon did everything she could and fought everyone possible to try to stop the divorce; Anne of Cleves wisely accepted annulment and an honoured place as the “King’s Sister”, and Katherine Parr played a smart and delicate balancing game until Henry died and she was free to marry the man she’d wanted to in the first place.
The tragedy comes not from the actual history (although there is tragedy there aplenty), but from the entertainment industry’s insistence on portraying it all through a modern lense, usually for ill, all heaving bosoms and wonderful sex (btw, it’s considered amongst some historians that Henry VIII was actually *not* very highly sexed). History isn’t like that, but as long as modern audiences, women and men, want history’s swashes to be well and truly buckled and bodices to be well-filled and then well-ripped, that’s what we’re going to get. And that’s a whole ‘nother topic.
Btw, for anyone who fancies the idea of past lives (I don’t), compare portaits of Anne Boleyn to photos of Wallis Simpson, a woman who also “schemed”, so they say, to get her man and was villified for it…there is a striking similarity. Henry VIII…Edward VIII…the latter sort of “brought down” by the woman he loved…coincidence? Who knows…maybe Anne got some kind of revenge after all. I’ve never heard anyone else proffer this thought, though, so please credit me with the idea, OK? Thanks.
So I watched the movie. I really didn’t like the way that they portrayed Anne as a schemer. This would not have been a position that was taken had she been a man. I think that this movie really could have been done in a more women friendly matter if they tried. It was really about perpetuating the idea that then as well as today it is a womans job to submit to a man. That she was a clearly intelligent woman who was doing the best she could with the circumstances at hand was totally downplayed. Over all it a little bit of a disappointment but these period pieces always are to some degree.
The movie was a horrible interpretation of the book. I highly suggest you read it as it delves much further into the sisters’ plight. A couple of hours is not near enough time to put their story to screen.
That being said I believe you should read the book. I read it this summer and just picked it up again. Anne is truly a woman of ambition. Horrid ambition is her downfall (and her namesake). However she fights for what she wants. She lost true love and that hardened her beyond repair. Mary goes through an amazing transition from silly, thoughtless pawn to a woman who cares to the extreme. Even George Boleyn has an intriguing story to tell in the book.
All the actors in this movie were too good for their roles. Natalie did what she could without having any place to go with character development and the writers did not begin to tap Scarlett’s resources with an extremely weak script…
If you were disappointed by the movie please please read the book. Email if you do or if you want to talk about it.
Your review of this is SO good. I was so busy hating this movie and being so frustrated by it that I neglected to pick up on so much of what you got from it - and yet it is all so obvious. You nailed it. It’s actually really disturbing that this shit gets made - and worse that even fairly intelligent people like myself are so used to seeing this same kind of anti-woman drivel that I don’t even notice what I’m being fed.
While the book is infinitely better - if only because it’s 600 pages of serious page turning fictional drama, as opposed to two hours of crushed together ridiculousness, I will say that I don’t feel they deviated too far from Gregory’s portrayal of Anne. It’s true that she’s more layered in the book - since there’s much more time spent on her - and you can see some of her plight and some of her ambition and attempt to control her life, but she still came off to me as totally unlikable and shrewish and horrible versus Mary “the saint”.
As a feminist, I hated myself for enjoying Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl, but I couldn’t help it - it was like watching bad reality tv. As penance I read several biographies about Henry and his wives afterwards - which ended up being even better than the fictionalized version.