Anne and Mary Boleyn are a pre-Elizabethan Yin and Yang. Anne, the older girl, is fey and dark-haired. Mary is fair-haired, reserved, and sensitive. Both end up getting just a little too much attention from the reigning monarch, Henry VIII of England. (That’s Elizabeth I’s father, a fact well worth being reminded of before seeing this film.)

Shortly after we are introduced to the two girls, Mary is happily married off to a local nobleman, excited at the prospect of settling down to raise their children-to-be at a country estate. But Mary’s scheming father and uncle arrange for KH VIII to visit the family home—for the purpose of, uh, distracting him from his failure to sire an heir with his wife, Katherine of Aragon. When their plans go awry, Henry ends up smitten with the young bride Mary… And one does not say “no” to the king. Off goes the family “to court,” and Mary to Henry’s bed. “It changes everything,” says Mary’s mother. “And not for the better.” The decidedly illicit affair culminates with a pregnancy and… well, an infant. (Remember: Henry had a passel of wives, but never had a legitimate son.)

Anne is naturally rather perturbed by all of this. As incensed as she initially is by the plan to seduce the king with a Boleyn lass, she quickly sees the “sense” in her uncle’s advice: “To be the mistress of the King of England is by no means to be diminished.” When the moment comes, she is docilely submissive to her father’s metaphoric admonition: “Tomorrow is the hunt. You must excel at that.” But when the moment passes and Henry dotes instead on her sister, you just know this will turn into a revenge story.

Anne goes off to court, too, quite determined to make her own mark. It turns out she makes too many—of the wrong sort, and she is banished to France. When Mary’s pregnancy becomes difficult, however, and Henry is once again looking for fields to furrow, if you will, Uncle and Dad recall Anne with a new and even more insidious mission. Soon she has Henry in the palm of her hand—and forces his hand to a formal divorce from Katherine. But when she, like Katherine before her, fails to produce that precious male heir, the die has been cast (pun intended): an excuse must be made to make Anne Boleyn—and her daughter—disappear.

So that leads us to the third Boleyn girl, Elizabeth: the unwanted girl child of Henry VIII who, after much intrigue, rules the country for more than four decades. She even has whole styles of literature and architecture named after her.

So we’ve got this historic potboiler with a cryptic title: “The Other Boleyn Girl.” Now, presumably, that’s Mary, right? After all, Anne is the one in all of the history books. But the film (as made, at least) isn’t ultimately about Mary. It’s about Anne, and the revenge she wreaks on Mary and Mary’s lover. Unless I’m mistaken (and I might be, as incidental dialogue is sometimes hard to track in a single viewing of a film), the girls’ father even refers to Anne—yes, Anne—as “the other Boleyn girl.”

But there are a couple of other intriguing possibilities that the film suggests. The first of these is that the film is really about Elizabeth. Why else would director Justin Chadwick conclude his film with such a heavy-handed post-script about the infant and her future? (Well, admittedly, it’s likely because the most significant beheading in the film is any sense of historical context. The real story of Henry Tudor is his historic break with the Roman Catholic Church, setting himself up as the head of the Church of England. Yet in Chadwick’s film, this is all mere footnotery as he rushes off to document Henry’s high crimes and misdemeanors in shorthand.)

The second possibility, frankly, is that the titular “other girl” is in fact their brother George. When the chips are down, he is without a doubt the most spineless and girlish of the bunch. He seems to have precious little interest in the opposite sex, and it’s hard to imagine he and Anne conspiring in the way that they do unless George didn’t actually consider the treason a sexual act. I have an odd feeling that George’s character was originally written as gay, with the filmmakers getting cold feet about the portrayal somewhere along the way.

It’s too bad, really, that Chadwick ends up steeplechasing through the film’s final act. Most of the way, he coaches some pretty nice performances from Scarlett Johansson as Mary and Natalie Portman as Anne. Down the stretch, Portman ends up coming off a little too much like Amidala on steroids and crack; but when Anne’s still smarting at Mary’s “betrayal” (and Chadwick has not yet kicked in the afterburners), Portman delivers a fine and controlled ferocity.

Chadwick has some nice visual touches in the early going, too, such as an idyllic county sequence with Anne and Mary strolling naively along a stream (silly geese!) and one in which Henry’s pending arrival is intercut with the butchering of beef (slabs of meat!). But the only consistent visual “treat” down the stretch is overused handheld shots peering at conspirators from behind pillars and tapestries.

At a thematic level, The Other Boleyn Girl is an enticing look at the question: “Is ambition a sin or a virtue?” The question also works well as a metaphor for the film itself. Did it shoot too high, or too low? In any event, the film is ultimately more sin than virtue.

The Other Boleyn Girl is rated PG-13 for “mature thematic elements, sexual content and some violent images.” This is a decent enough study of British decadence for most teens; but really, if you want a better film from that period, try A Man for All Seasons, Lady Jane, or Elizabeth.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Greg attended a press screening of The Other Boleyn Girl.