Sisterhood is Powerless

Today, I let my father rouse me far earlier than I would have preferred in order to go see The Other Boleyn Girl, Hollywood's treatment of the Philippa Gregory novel of the same name. I had been in great anticipation about this movie, as I had greatly enjoyed reading the novel last May. With Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman providing the key performances, I assumed I would be seeing an at least passable adapation of Gregory's work.

Instead, what I saw was a mishmash from beginning to end. The main problem, as near as I could tell, is that the scriptwriter had no clue what Gregory's novel had been about. The novel is a treatment of the story of Anne Boleyn's courtship with Henry VIII largely from the point of view of Anne's sister, Mary--hence, the other Boleyn girl.

In Gregory's account, Mary is twelve years old--yes, twelve--when her family forms ambitions surrounding Henry VIII's alienation of affections from Catherine of Aragon, who has failed to bear him a male heir, much less a spare. Mary is at this time already married off to a cipher named William Carey, but the Boleyns have no scruples about cuckolding him to advance the family cause. Mary is all but shoved into the king's bed and enjoys a brief period as the king's favorite while Anne pursues a nobleman at court named Henry Percy, whom she ultimately weds on the sly. Learning of this clandestine marriage, the Boleyns force its annulment and send Anne packing to France. Meanwhile, Mary conceives Henry's child.

Mary's child proves to be the long longed-for boy, but all does not prove sunny for her. While she is recuperating from childbirth, the family puts Anne before the king in order to keep up his interest. Out of pure spite for Mary, who had revealed her marriage to the family, Anne schemes to divert Henry's attention from her and overwhelmingly succeeds

For Anne, the rest of the novel proceeds pretty much as we remember the romance of Anne and Henry from high school history. But for Mary, life becomes very interesting indeed. William Carey long out of the picture, she becomes involved with a servant named William Stafford, who has saved diligiently from his earnings at court and bought a little place in the country. He ultimately persuades her to leave her conniving family and become a fairly typical farm wife of the middling sort.

The interesting thing about the novel, for me, had been its clear focus on, and preference for, Mary. Throughout the novel, it's clear that Mary does not want to be a pawn in the Boleyn's games with Henry VIII but can find no way out. Anne, on the other hand, is shown as a woman of endless ambition. The film completely failed to retain the novel's focus on Mary and so devolved into just another tiresome treatment of the Anne and Henry soap opera.

The film also did a very bad of showing any real sense of Mary's feelings toward her sister. In the book, the relationship between Anne and Mary was frought and complex. But coming out of the the film, I felt I had no real sense of how Mary truly felt about the sister who treated her so mercilessly, so savagely, for the sake of fulfilling the family ambitions. True, Mary pleads--unsuccessfully--for her sister's life, but I found myself unable to discern whether this display of sisterly affection was genuine.

One review I saw of the movie said essentially that the film was about the Paris Hiltons of its day. Hardly--at least in the case of Mary. Unlike the notorious Ms. Hilton, Mary never sought the role into which her family had flung her. After Henry succeeds in ridding himself of Catherine of Aragon, the people of England turn on Anne, but not on Mary--indicating that they were unaware of her relationship with Henry. One never gets the sense, in either the novel or the film, that Mary is actively seeking the limelight. So the comparison with Paris Hilton is inept, inapt, and ultimately unjust.