The Other Boleyn Girl
Written by Peter Morgan
Directed by Justin Chadwick
Focus Features/Columbia Pictures
2008
Rating:


If Shekhar Kapur's "Elizabeth" is a feminist work of female defiance and its sequel "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" is borderline anti-feminist in its hysteria, then the pseudo-prequel "The Other Boleyn Girl" is a work of faux feminism. Buried beneath the opulent costumes and "Masterpiece Theater" director Justin Chadwick's endless shots of fields of grain, passing clouds and castle exteriors is a story about the timelessness of misogyny and man's tendency to turn women against each other.

When Katherine of Aragon (Ana Torrent) falls out of favor with King Henry VIII (Eric Bana) because of her inability to produce a male heir, Sir Thomas Boleyn (Mark Rylance) sees an opportunity to advance his ambitions – by pimping out his daughters Anne (Natalie Portman) and Mary (Scarlett Johansson) as Henry's mistresses.

The script by Peter Morgan (his third consecutive historically based clunker following the overrated and Oscar-winning "The Queen" and "The Last King of Scotland") reduces Anne and Mary to their uteruses. This reduction may have been fine if "The Other Boleyn Girl" was still able to muster up the energy to say something profound about the historical mistreatment of women, but the movie is just as shallow in its feminism as it is in its history.

Posted Friday, February 29, 2008

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/archives/001063.php