The oversexed soap opera that history remembers as "The Tudors" migrates from Showtime to the big screen in "The Other Boleyn Girl."
It's a lovely period piece, but the major motion picture has the extreme misfortune of coming along hot on the heels of a more fleshed out and fleshy season of a cable series that covers almost exactly the same ground.
Better cast and much more handsomely mounted than "The Tudors," "Boleyn" suffers from a wealth of promises it fails to keep. A delicious first hour introduces us to the scheming Boleyn clan, lesser lights at court until an uncle, the Duke of Norfolk (David Morrissey, utterly cold-blooded), talks his equally ambitious and weak-willed brother-in-law (Mark Rylance, simpering) into offering up first one, then the other of his fair daughters as a lure to the wandering eye of Henry, played with brooding, beard-rubbing lust by Eric Bana.
Anne (Natalie Portman) is the natural first choice as Henry bait. The king's Catholic Spaniard wife, Catherine of Aragon, can't give him a son. He will cast about for a mistress or some other solution to his "no male heir" problem. Anne is no shrinking violet. She's mercenary enough to relish the challenge.
But Henry is smitten with Mary (Scarlett Johansson), Anne's demure and newly married younger sister. She resists as he makes arrangements to bring her within his reach, but watch how Johansson plays Mary's moment of surrender when she realizes that the heel pursuing her is the man who actually "gets" her.
Despite many emotional moments supplied by the leads, especially by Portman, the better actress, "The Other Boleyn" sudses up into nothing more than historical soap opera. We're treated to the odd pretty location, stunning costumes and a tendency to truncate history, time and events to wrap up this complicated bloodletting in under two hours. (Rated PG-13.)
