• Book: The Other Boleyn Girl, Philippa Gregory, 2001
• Film: The Other Boleyn Girl, adapted by Peter Morgan and directed by Justin Chadwick, 2007
Say what you will about the movie The Other Boleyn Girl—that it's shallow, melodramatic, and sometimes campy, that it plays fast and loose with history, that it hollows out a book that was already kind of hollow to begin with. In fact, I encourage you to say all those things about it. But it's hard to criticize how pretty it is, or how well-cast its two female leads are. The film discards or simplifies much of the book's action, beyond the broadest, most historically based plot points, but it sticks by the book's portrayals of its two Boleyn girls: Scarlett Johansson as Mary is vapid, ineffectual, and barely there, while Natalie Portman as Anne Boleyn is tempestuous and unpredictable, except where her unswerving selfishness and ambition are concerned. They were both cast accurately and intelligently, based on their past roles and their abilities. The only problem is that Portman is so much more vivacious and involved in her role that she steals an awful lot of sympathy away from the pallid, hapless Johansson. Given how hard the book works to make Anne into an incomprehensible monster, and how hard the film works to make Mary into an innocent victim, that becomes a fairly large problem with the story.
Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl is the first in what became her series of novels set in the Tudor era, including (in release order, though their stories don't play out in chronological order) The Virgin's Lover, The Constant Princess, The Boleyn Inheritance, and the upcoming The Other Queen. I haven't read the others, but Other Boleyn Girl is essentially a historical novel, perched on the edge of being a historical romance, but lacking a romance novel's panting sex, and free from words like "stormy," "throbbing," and "tumescence." At the same time, while it leans heavily on historical events, it feels as much like a fantasy novel as historical fiction; the names and timeline are historical, but the characters live in a fuzzy, bright, detail-light parade of parties, hunts, masques, games, and scheming sessions. Change the names, and this could be a Guy Gavriel Kay book; throw in some more erotica and the occasional nosy, interfering angel, and it could be a Jacqueline Carey novel.
It's also written in a fairly simple style, with brief paragraphs and easy words. It's too hefty a book to be a really light read—my paperback copy is 735 pages long—but it glides along easily, with a lot of broad, summing-up narrative and a lot of quick-moving dialogue, like in this scene, where Anne Boleyn and her brother George tell their sister Mary about their latest plan to pin Henry VIII down to marriage with Anne, even though he's already fathered two children on Mary:
"The thing is," Anne said lightly, turning her collar up against the cold wind, "I thought I would adopt Henry."
"You thought what?"
"I thought I would adopt little Henry as my own son."
I was so astounded, I could only look at her. "You don't even like him very much," I said, the first foolish thought of a loving mother. "You never even play with him. George has spent more time with him than you."
Anne glanced away, as if seeking patience from the river and the jumbled rooftops of the city beyond. "No. Of course. That's not why I would adopt him. I don't want him because I like him."
Slowly, I started to think. "So that you have a son. Henry's son. You have a son who is a Tudor by birth. If he marries you, then in the same ceremony, he gets a son."
She nodded.
I turned and took a couple of steps, my riding boots crunching on the frozen gravel. I was thinking furiously. "And of course, this way, you take my son away from me. So I am less desirable to Henry. In one move you make yourself the mother of the king's son and you take away my great claim to his attention."
George cleared his throat, and leaned against the river wall, arms folded across his chest, his face a picture of detachment. I rounded on him. "You knew?"
He shrugged. "She told me after she'd done it. She did it as soon as we told her that the family thought that you might take the eye of the king again. She only told Father and Uncle after the king had agreed and the deed was done. Uncle thought it a keen bit of play."
I found my throat dry and I swallowed. "A keen bit of play?"
"And it means that you are provided for," George said fairly. "It puts your son close to the throne, it concentrates all the benefits on Anne, it's a good plan."
"This is my son!" I could hardly say the words, I was choking on my grief. "He is not for sale like some Christmas goose driven into market."
George rose from the wall and put his arm around my shoulders, turned me to face him. "No one's selling him, we're making him all but a prince," he said. "We're claiming his rights for him. He could be the next King of England. You should be proud."
I closed my eyes and felt the onshore wind on the cold skin of my face. I thought for a moment that I might faint or vomit, and more than anything else I longed for that, to be struck down so sick that they had to take me home to Hever and leave me there forever with my children.
"And Catherine? What about my daughter?"
"You can keep Catherine," Anne said precisely. "She's only a girl."
Doubtless some people disliked Other Boleyn Girl precisely for its loose, airy, fantasy-novel mentality, and I don't blame them—there isn't all that much sense of specificity of time or place in a book that has its characters constantly saying "Buck up and remember that you're a Boleyn girl, a Howard girl," without in any way explaining what that means. The book treats the Boleyn lineage as a badge of honor—not just a mark of personal pride, but of historical importance. And yet it never gets around to explaining why anyone but a Boleyn/Howard descendant should care. But personally, I actually enjoyed that about this book. The assumption that we should know what these names mean, and why, is the assumption that the reader has at least a wee bit of brain matter, and I like my books to assume that.
Now if only the book's protagonist had a brain too.
Here's how the book and film are similar. Both tell the historically based story of Henry VIII's first two wives—how he married Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon, who failed to give him a male heir; how he took Mary Boleyn as a lover, and fathered children with her; how he later defied the pope to divorce Catherine and take Mary's sister Anne Boleyn as his new wife; and how she, too, failed to produce a male heir. So he had her tried for various horrible, possibly fabricated crimes, and executed.
And here's how the book and film are different: The book makes this all into a story about vastly grasping ambition, and how it swept a family to prominence, changed how an entire country thought of its monarchy, and then smashed a great many lives, leaving political and personal wreckage behind. In the film, on the other hand, it's basically about a fight between two sisters who both want the same dude. Sure, all that other stuff happens too, but all the emphasis is placed on the emotional damage Anne does to Mary by being a total ho-bag and stealing her man. There are other themes in play in the film—particularly the idea that women were helpless pawns in Tudor society, which the film plays up far more than the book—but all the film's central scenes are really about Anne and Mary. Yes, their relationship is a big part of the book, too, but the book has so many other threads, ideas, and subplots packed in that it blunts the emotional damage of what they do to each other. Whereas the film strips things down, and takes the two of them as the one single focus that ties events together.
And yet the movie leaves out many of the most specific awful, damaging things Anne does to Mary in the book. Why? Because, as with the scene above, they largely involve Mary's children and her love for them, and that just isn't sexy. And the movie is all about sex, sexiness, sexiosity, and most especially the things men will do to get sex. (Though curiously, it's almost as coy about on-the-record sex as the book is, and it mostly uses sex as a big shocker. But we'll get to that.)
There are so many differences between the film and the book that it's hard to really get a handle on them, even though they mostly point in the same direction. So let's try a category-based breakdown this time around:
• Anne Boleyn. Where to start? Perhaps near the beginning of the film, when her ambitious uncle and father purposely put her under Henry VIII's nose when he visits their estate, because he may want a mistress, given the queen's ongoing failure to produce an heir. But her aggressiveness causes an accident that hurts the king. Her shy sister Mary tends his wounds and attracts his attention, so he hauls her (mostly unwillingly) off to bed while Anne sulks and instead seduces an important noble's important son, Henry Percy, and marries him on the sly. Mary, horrified, tells the rest of the family, and Anne and Henry are hauled home in disgrace, and told their marriage is invalid and that in spite of what they remember, they most certainly did not consummate (and thus validate) it. Anne is shipped off to exile in the French court, to her horror. But she returns later, full of fury and wanting vengeance on Mary for stealing the king's affections and for tattling about Henry Percy. And so the whole film becomes about Anne's revenge, which she gets by stealing the king from Mary in turn.
In the book, by contrast, Anne doesn't seem to have motives as mundane as revenge and jealousy. Instead, she's an almost supernatural, incomprehensible bitch from early on. I've seen other fantasy authors do this—George R.R. Martin leaps to mind as someone else who hooks readers in largely by creating monstrous miscarriages of justice that they love to hate. The book version of Anne is basically a Martin character—ridiculously seductive, ridiculously ambitious, and never at a loss for the absolute most horrible thing to say to her sister and her other rivals. Book-Anne doesn't screw up a hunt and get Henry hurt early on, and she doesn't need petty reasons like Mary's success to drive her to ambition. She just wants power—complete and utter power, which she abuses ruthlessly, to destroy people who once crossed her, or who might cross her in future. She makes a point of humiliating and destroying people, and of saying patently over-the-top things, for instance about how once she has the king's heart, she'll make sure he can never love anyone but her, not even their children, because that would lessen her power. She's an evil force of nature, and the book is as much about how she gets her way until she gets her comeuppance as anything else.
Although, oddly, she claims in the book that she really did love Henry Percy, and that she spent her whole short adult life pining for that first lost love. Then again, maybe she's just saying that because she's a selfish, crazed drama queen, and it sounds good.
She also spends much of the book struggling with the effort to keep Henry VIII entranced without letting him fuck her. In the film, she uses her nearly magical French-court-learned wiles to lead him on but to deny him her body, leading to a fairly ridiculous series of scenes in which he keeps asking, petulantly, "Will you give yourself to me now?" In the book, however, she and Mary were both raised in the French court, and have the exact same training and the same wiles, and it's Anne's liveliness, beauty, and determined efforts that keep Henry's focus on her. While the movie compresses all the action into what seems like about a year, the book points out that Anne spent years sexually denying Henry while trying to hold his interest, all so she could persuade him to divorce his wife and marry her in exchange for that first night in the sack. And it wears on her heavily; one of the running plots in the book involves how difficult it is for her to be the brightest light at court constantly, without rest, for years on end.
Both book and movie seem to lose interest in Anne once she gets what she wants and is queen; at that point, in both cases, it feels like the story's over and there's nothing left but a long rush to the denouement and downfall.
That aside, will audiences ever get tired of seeing Natalie Portman being slowly and thoroughly broken down into a state of abject, weeping helplessness? This, V For Vendetta, Goya's Ghosts… Are they all just revenge for the Star Wars prequels or something? I'm personally getting pretty tired of seeing her ritually abused.
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