The Other Boleyn Girl (2008) is annoying—excellent acting, wonderful costumes, and all that effort goes down the drain in a soap opera masquerading as a historical drama. The myriad problems start with the title. While the book The Other Boleyn Girl was about Mary Boleyn, the movie does not maintain that original and interesting focus and becomes another movie about Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s famous second wife. It is more accurate to say that the movie tries to follow both Boleyn girls and tries to develop their relationship. But it is even more accurate to say that this movie is not about the historical figures Anne and Mary Boleyn but rather a soap opera irresponsibly using the names of historical characters.
I acknowledge that historical information before about 1640 is difficult to come by. To take a small example, no church records exist to ascertain the years in which Anne and Mary were born. However, that does not give novelists and screenwriters carte blanche to make up anything they want. To continue the example, Boleyn family members, including Mary’s children, reported that Mary was older than Anne, and this is pretty reliable evidence considering how sketchy details from the 1500s are. Yet the movie cannot even bother to get this small fact right, and it makes something significant of the “fact” that Anne is the older sister.
Although I do not know a great deal about Henry VIII’s time, I quickly lost confidence in the veracity of the movie. Consider, for example, Anne and Mary’s father. He is portrayed as a spineless lesser noble willing to prostitute his daughters to climb the social ladder. But as the movie went on, I noticed that all the men, except one minor character, are evil. We see nothing of Henry VIII’s impressive education and talents—just a horny absolute monarch preying on girls who catch his eye. So I checked what historians had to say about the disgusting Mr. Boleyn. One of the more respected nobles of his day, he had a gift for languages and for international diplomacy, representing England abroad for both Henry VII and VIII. Whoa!
I watched the movie in large part because it has an unusually good screenwriter, Peter Morgan e.g., Longford, a superb drama, and The Queen, winner of many awards. On these two films, Morgan is listed as “writer” while on The Other Boleyn Girl, he is “screenwriter” adapting a popular novel of dubious accuracy. Is this why the final script is such a mess? Or, given some of the poor editing, did someone get a hold of the film and chop it to bits? Or did the director take the film down the wrong road? I do not know, but I recommend avoiding the wreckage.