Review: The Other Boleyn Girl

There’s something daft and off about Justin Chadwick’s “The Other Bolelyn Girl,” a distempered adaptation (by “The Queen”‘s Peter Morgan) of Philippa Gregory’s chick-friendly historical bodice ripper. Two dead elements: Eric Bana, who, with his dead black eyes and near-total lack of personality has only shone in the mad-hattery of “Chopper,” and was one of the fatal cracks in the ambitions of “The Hulk,” as the King Henry VIII of England, a man who speaks of authority with little or none. Second is the choice to shoot the movie in high-definition video and be released on film: I was excited about the prospects of a period piece shot this way, but the result is curiously flat and erratically edited. Sweeping crane shots that rise and peer through castle spaces end with an abrupt lack of rhythm several times, for instance. Rich costumes and multiple compositions within royal chambers suggest the vibrant stillness of paintings like Hans Holbein the Younger’s “Sir Thomas More” or the level afternoon light of Vermeer or various and sundry Dutch genre painters such as Steen or der Hooch. But the story about the Bolelyn girls (Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman) dueling over who will triumph in whoredom as concubine to the king remains alternately inert and roistering, especially during several of Portman’s mad scenes. If this were the 1940s, she’d’ve done them bouncing off the castle walls. Ana Torrent is a pleasant diversion as the fallow Queen, years older than her masterful childhood roles in “Cria Cuervos” and “Sprit of the Beehive” but still as brightly, dancingly dark-eyed. 129m. (Ray Pride)