• Mary Boleyn. In the book, she's the POV character; virtually all the scenes and analysis are from her perspective. (There's one that isn't, for some reason, and it's hugely jarring.) The movie, by contrast, has no problem going places she doesn't go, which makes for a more holistic but less personally nuanced view of the world—though hours of debate could be wasted on whether the film's version of Mary seems less nuanced because we never get into her head, or because she's so much more passive in the film's version of events, or just because she's played by Scarlett Johansson. At any rate, the book's Mary isn't nearly as blank and helpless as the film's version, but even hanging out inside her head, it's rarely possible to tell why she puts up with so much unbelievable crap from her sister. Early on, she spends a little time talking about their mutual love and their mutual jealousy and competition, but as the book wears on and Anne becomes more and more of a terrifying psychopath, there's less and less reason for Mary to cooperate with her, and the book doesn't particularly justify it. Perhaps because it's impossible to justify.
At any rate. The film's Mary is a meek girl who goes along with her family's plots, even when it removes her from her marriage and puts her into the king's bed, mostly against her will. Henry VIII knocks her up, but the vengeful Anne lures him away, pushing him to promise never to see Mary again literally as Mary is giving birth to his child, in a scene rife with fairly ridiculous melodrama.
And then she gets pushed around a bunch more, and she's sad about it, but she stays loyal to her sister. In the book, she isn't necessarily any more emotionally complicated, but there are many more forces at work on her. For instance, she falls in love with Henry long before he decides to take her to bed. Then she falls in love with her two children by him, and wants to help raise them. (Her family then mechanically uses them to force her into doing whatever they want; any time she resists any plan of theirs, someone asks, like clockwork, "You want to see your children again this summer, don't you?") She also falls in love with her family's simple homestead, and the peasants that work the land, and she gets to know them and gets involved with their crops and their goals. She then repeatedly emphasizes, to her family and to the reader, that she could just drop out of court and go home and live a simple life at any time, and that would be just awesome with her.
In the book, she also has a fairly complicated relationship with Catherine of Aragon, whom she admires utterly and is nonetheless forced by her family loyalties to betray over and over. And she has men in her life other than the king, who complicate matters further. Basically, there's a whole lotta stuff going on with her, dragging her in different directions and distracting her from her crazy bitch sister. It's a fairly complicated story, in spite of the simple writing.
• Henry VIII. In the movie, Eric Bana plays him as a dark, brooding, manly man of passion, but the script doesn't give him much to do; he's more like the game piece the two women are playing for than a character. From time to time, he disappears offscreen for a bit and comes back reporting that he's, you know, restructured the entirety of British law and religion in order to get Anne into the sack. But he's never really a character. In the book, on the other hand, he's an omnipresent force hovering over everything that happens, and it's emphasized very strongly that he's a petulant child who's been cosseted and praised all his life, and that he isn't happy unless he's winning all the games, getting the lead roles in the masques, and otherwise being petted and entertained and played with all the time. And unlike Eric Bana, midway through the book he starts getting fat and slovenly. Again, not very sexy, hence left out of the movie. For me, the portrayal of Henry was one of the best parts of the book, largely because it's nuanced and complicated: Here's a man who controls an entire country, and does it reasonably cannily, but at the same time, is a total brat. It becomes much easier to understand how Anne can manipulate him so well just by denying him something he wants—which no one else dares to do—and how it leads to such a bad place when he finally, at long last, gets what he wanted, and then realizes it wasn't ultimately worth all the trouble.
• Catherine of Aragon. Movie version: Played with great presence, but very little of it, by Ana Torrent. She gets much more stage time in the book, mostly so the book can emphasize how very, very queenly and composed and intelligent and elegant she is, as opposed to oh-so-monstrous, crass, grabby Anne.
• George Boleyn. Movie version: A minor character in the background. Toward the end, Anne tries to get him to have sex with her when Henry won't, so she can produce an heir. He tries gamely, for the family's sake, but simply can't manage. Nonetheless, as in history, when they're both tried and executed, an incestuous relationship between them is one of the charges. Book version: George is a major character, a dashing and beloved courtier almost as present as Anne and Mary. He's also gay (another one of the charges historically presented against him), and there's a lengthy plot involving his love affair with a young man of the court, and how it develops, and how he has to deny himself or risk discovery and execution. And yet he's also clearly Anne's lover, and they do have a creepy incestuous relationship, which eventually produces a hideously mutated, miscarried child, in the book's weirdest, most fantasy-ish touch.
• Mary's first husband. In the movie, he's quickly shunted aside when Henry VIII takes an interest in Mary, and he more or less disappears. In the book, he's an ongoing presence who pops up periodically to remind Mary that even though she has two children by the king and is a fixture at court, and even though he's accepted wealth, power, and titles as bribes to stand aside in favor of the king, she's still his wife. Later, when her fortunes change, he's briefly a threatening villain, since he has the legal right to sweep her off to his estate and do whatever he wants with her and her children, who are supposedly his children, since the king hasn't officially claimed them as his own. He and Mary are strangers by this point, but he strongly makes the point that he has every right to command and control her. But she comes to better terms with him fairly quickly. And later, he sickens and dies, leaving her as a very young widow.
• Mary's second husband. The movie version of this character comes so completely out of nowhere that I thought it was her first husband finally resurfacing, even though the way he's portrayed doesn't make any sense in that context: He suddenly appears and suggests they get married, and off they go. In the book, their relationship is a major plotline: He's a poor, ordinary man with a little land, working as a hired hand, but he befriends her over a long period of time, and then romances her, and eventually she runs off and marries him. Then, when Anne drags her back to court, she has him as a loyal friend in her corner, untainted by ambition or by too much time having his values warped by the social bubble of the king's court. He's another major character the movie basically drops in order to make the story entirely about Mary and Anne.
• The rest of the Boleyn family. Not very detailed in either film or book, save as a vague group of people who get together from time to time to plot how best to use Anne or Mary to their advantage. Mostly of interest to me for two reasons: In the movie, Anne and Mary's mother is a sympathetic but helpless character, who repeatedly speaks out against the way the family uses the girls as pawns. She's part of the whole sense that the movie is trying to build up that Tudor society uses and abuses its women, who should at least be loyal to each other, as Mary is to Anne, even when Anne isn't to Mary. In the book, on the other hand, their mother is just as crassly ruthless and ambitious as their father and uncle. She even makes a point of telling Mary that she's a sentimental twit for caring about her children and waiting to have a hand in raising them, which is servant work. Also, in keeping with the book's "Anne is an outsized monster" theme, Anne winds up dictating most of the strategy to the family most of the time, from very early on. Which is a far cry from the movie version, where the women are being repressed by the cruel men.
• The rest of the world. The movie takes place more or less entirely at court. The book, however makes a point of how the Boleyns were seen in the cities and countryside in England, and how the masses reacted to the news that Catherine was being divorced and Anne was taking her place: largely with pitchforks, torches, and angry killer mobs, as if Anne was an old-school movie monster. Again, this was some of the more interesting stuff in the book, largely because it steps outside the insular little world of so many costume dramas to show how much the madding crowd would like to get their hands on people inside that world and dance on their sticky bones. Similarly, the book at least nods toward what was going on in France and Spain and Rome at the time, and how it affected the English court, particularly Henry and Catherine's relationship—which again, was some of the more interesting material, since it sets aside the all-too-common passion play in favor of looking at the working relationship between two powerful people who married for political reasons, and whose countries are frequently at odds.
• "The other Boleyn girl." That phrase is used, as far as I recall, once in the film. Maybe twice. In the book, it's more like six or seven times, sometimes referring to Anne, sometimes Mary, depending on how the tides have turned. When Anne becomes Queen, Mary just refers to her as "the Boleyn girl," indicating that Mary herself no longer even counts as a presence. Later, when both of their stars are falling, Mary starts referring to "the other Boleyn girls" who will no doubt be trotted out next to compete for the king's affections. Ugh. There are motifs, and then there's getting cutesy with overly obvious, forced repetition.
• The sex. The book is just a few steps shy of a romance novel, and the movie is all about two sexy girls competing to see which one has sexy sex with the sexy king. So why is there so little sex in either version? And why is it so creepy in both cases, and so tied up in quaint old punishment dramas? In the film, Mary and Henry have a brief, soft-edged, romantic candlelit tryst when he first commands her into his bed. Then Anne tempts him away, and spends much of the rest of the film leading him on and putting him off. When he finally breaks with Rome, he storms into her rooms and says he's had enough delay, and he throws her down and violently rapes her from behind. And later, Anne wails to the unsympathetic Mary about the unnamed but dire, humiliating, grotesque sexual horrors she has to put herself through in order to keep the increasingly bored Henry interested in her. The film is clearly set up to show the contrast between the sisters' experiences: Mary, the shy good girl who doesn't want to have sex with the king, but placidly goes along with it, gets a gentle, idealized romantic encounter; Anne, the demanding bad girl who tries to use sex as a weapon, gets punished for taking control and for not cooperating with the man who lusts after her. This is an old, old narrative dynamic, and a pretty stomach-churning one. Especially since the rape and the "sexual horrors" monologue were invented for the film. And since they don't make much sense. If he could get away with raping her without consequence, why didn't he do it three years earlier, and save himself and England a whole lot of pain?
In the book, by contrast, what little sex there is is pretty muted, which is why it's fairly jarring when midway through, out of nowhere, Anne bitches to Mary about how hard it is to keep putting Henry off, and how she's let him grope and fondle her, but she doesn't dare do more. And Mary gives Anne a quick, graphic rundown on the "whore's tricks" Mary used to perform on Henry to keep his interest: oral sex and mutual masturbation. Anne is annoyed but fascinated, and she later reports that she's incorporated these acts into her repertoire, and that Henry's much more controlled. And that's about the last we hear about that, until he's accusing her in court of unnatural acts and seducing him with those "whore's tricks," as part of the evidence that she's a lewd woman, unfit to be queen. Here, the hypocrisy reflects more on him than on her; it's another punishment narrative, but it's more about how unfair life as a woman was at the time. Which comes up a lot in the book.
Either way, both versions are more about what women can get with sex and the promise of sex than about actual, you know, sex. In fact, it's more or less implied in both cases that sex is an unpleasant chore most of the time, and that it's only really useful to girls if they can maximize their profit in exchange. Or wind up with someone whom they actually love, not that that generally happens.
• The tennis. For some reason, there's a bunch of tennis in the book. Probably because Gregory was tickled to learn that the Tudors played tennis. The movie? Not so much tennis.
• The big points. The movie essentially has two: The emotional impact of all the conflict between Anne and Mary, and the way women suffered historically as second-class citizens with limited power to determine their own fate. The book is scattershot with its messages, and packs a ton of themes into a small space, but the one that stuck with me most was the idea that the Boleyns single-familiedly wrecked England, by undermining the monarchy on all sides: By encouraging the common folk to see their rulers as capricious humans who made terrible choices, by encouraging Henry VIII to be a spoiled brat, by specifically encouraging him to divest himself of all ties that might have constrained his behavior, by getting him started down the path of considering his wives disposable, by breaking the very institute of marriage in England. It's pointed out several times that once Catherine was set aside, no wife was safe in England; if the king himself could set aside a royal spouse and trade her in for a hot young trophy model, why couldn't anyone else? More to the point, why would he bother sticking by Anne once a prettier, younger face came along? But also, there are a lot of expected messages about how love is better than power, and the simple farm life is better than the rich court life, with all its frustrations and all its nasty, grasping people. And also how virtue and steadfastness and loyalty and love are rewarded in the end. Again, shades of a fantasy novel.
So. Book, or Film? I didn't wholeheartedly enjoy either, and I think they're both pretty flawed, but both had their high points, and both were fairly entertaining as far as they went. I haven't said much here (largely because I said it in my review) about how sumptuous and pretty the movie is, in an Elizabeth-esque costume-drama way, which is one of the big draws. And while it's a fairly shallow, narrow story with a lot of cheap melodrama (pregnant woman abandoned in childbirth! After Anne's death, Mary carries her child through the entire castle, with everyone silently parting before her in a big ridiculous climax!) it moves along pretty quickly, and the performances are often terrific even when the script is clumsy as hell. The book, meanwhile, was a fairly slick, bestseller kind of read, with a lot going on, and a number of surprises. It wasn't great, but it was an entertaining diversion, somewhere between a trashy beach novel and something with a little bulk and complexity.
The big problem for me with the book was that it tries too hard to make Mary a saintly victim, emphasizing over and over how badly her family, her king, her gender, and her sister misuse her, and it felt so forcefully, artificially manipulative that it periodically just became annoying. Whereas the big problem with the movie, as I said at the beginning, was that Anne is a far more interesting character than Mary. Not a sympathetic one, exactly, but much more so than she was in the book, less prone to nastiness for nastiness' sake. By sheer force of will, Natalie Portman becomes the center of the film's universe, while her paler, blanker co-star fades into the background. Just as it supposedly happened in the real life of the story. Appropriate, really. Just not very satisfying in the end.
Next week: The return of Nathan's Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club.
And next in Book Vs. Film:
Coming soon:
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