From The Times

The Other Boleyn Girl's a ripping yarn: not real history
There's a fairytale element to forthcoming The Other Boleyn Girl says the historian, and no harm in that

by Antonia Fraser


The late great George Macdonald Fraser sprang to the aid of historical movies in a book called The Hollywood History of the World. “A picture of the ages more vivid and memorable than anything in Tacitus or Gibbon or Macaulay,” he said, claiming that inaccuracies simply didn't matter. We historians might beg to differ (quickly taking the opportunity to ally myself with the Three Wise Men) - but then we would, wouldn't we?

It remains an interesting question for historians, teachers and all lovers of history whether the creator of Flashman had a point: do the many inaccuracies, not to say travesties, in historical movies matter compared with the general illumination and insight they may bring? The latest offering The Other Boleyn Girl makes a perfect case in point for us to consider the question.

The Other Boleyn Girl is set in Tudor times - and they are times we are getting to know pretty well in film terms these days, what with the successful BBC TV series The Tudors last autumn, as well as Elizabeth: The Golden Age. The story of the new film is taken from Philippa Gregory's bestselling novel of the same title. It is adapted for the screen by Peter Morgan, celebrated for writing the screenplay about a very different queen, Elizabeth II as portrayed by Helen Mirren.

“The other Boleyn girl” is Mary, Anne's lesser-known sister who also had an affair with Henry VIII. Basically the film centres on the rivalry between the two sisters, their alternating bouts of love, jealousy, betrayal and support, ending in a dénouement which has Mary trying in vain to save Anne from the scaffold, despite the fact that the predatory Anne took Henry away from her. In case you didn't notice that the girls are sisters, they repeatedly remind us of the fact throughout the movie, with moments of philosophy such as: “because she's my sister ... she's one half of me”.

The first thing to be said is that the film is extremely enjoyable, partly because of stellar performances by Natalie Portman as Anne and Scarlett Johansson as Mary, one a sultry dark beauty and the other fairytale blonde. In fact there is a fairytale element to the whole story; it's Rose Red and Snow White for adults, with Eric Bana as a fairly charming Prince, frequently stripping off. (Having become a connoisseur of Henry VIII's chest, I rather preferred that of The Tudors' Jonathan Rhys Meyer.) There's a further dazzling performance by Kristin Scott Thomas as the girls' mother in which she allows herself - surely - to be artificially aged and looks more beautiful than ever.

Inaccurate? Obviously you can't expect a film taken from an historical novel to be accurate since historical novelists, by definition, are using their imagination. There are certainly many liberties taken to suit the story: Anne's early encounter with Henry has no basis in fact. In reality Mary Boleyn also went to France and attended the Queen there, rather than skulking winsomely in the country, and Anne herself was certainly not banished.

As to Mary's child during her Carey marriage, who is featured as the unquestioned son of Henry, the dates don't fit historically. Even more to the point, the Carey boy was born at a time when Henry was so desperate for a male heir that he ennobled another bastard by Bessie Blount, Henry Fitzroy, and made him a Duke (of Richmond, a quasi- royal title in those days). Unfortunately Fitzroy died, but there is evidence that in his lifetime the King was contemplating making use of him as a spare male heir in the absence of a legitimate one. No such steps were taken in the direction of the Carey boy; the prominence he gained as Lord Hunsdon in the reign of Elizabeth began with the fact that he was not so much her half-brother as her first cousin; Elizabeth was ever supportive of her Boleyn relations.

My personal experience of historical films has been a happy one. In 2006 I was lucky enough to have my biography of Marie Antoinette made into a film of the same name, written and directed by Sofia Coppola. I say lucky because everything went well from the beginning, starting with the moment when I told her with sincerity: “I have given my vision in my book, and anyone who wants to know what I think can read it. Now you make your movie, give your vision and, as it were, don't mind me.”I told myself from the start that a book and a movie were two quite different things and as a result I had no problem of emotional possessiveness throughout our five-year association.

I certainly loved the movie, including Coppola's daring use of rock music to delineate the 18th-century party girl she took the French queen to be. People who expected - or hoped - that I would shudder were disappointed. Inaccuracies? As such there were remarkably few in the story. I remember having a few pangs at the apparently disrespectful way courtiers treated the Queen; Rose Byrne as the Princesse de Lamballe comes to mind, bustling into the royal box at the opera without so much as a curtsey, merely an enthusiastic cry of “Cheree!” But if the film had followed the correct elaborate protocols of Versailles it would have lasted six hours or more.

I had the same problem with the recent Elizabeth: The Golden Age, in which Clive Owen as Sir Walter Raleigh drove me mad by strutting about in front of Cate Blanchett's queen like Errol Flynn in a white ruffled shirt open to the navel. “Get that man a doublet,” I hissed.

Coppola decided early on to end the story before Marie Antoinette was executed, with her enforced departure from Versailles and the vanishing of the old way of life. So no tragic execution scene. “We know all that,” she told me, leaving me to reflect basely: “And if we don't, we can always go and buy my book.”

Vivid and memorable, in Macdonald Fraser's phrase? Certainly the exquisite Oscar-winning costumes and settings conveyed more richly than my hopefully fine descriptions ever could the world of Marie Antoinette. And I find that in my mind's eye Kirsten Dunst's wistful face has begun to take over from the portraits as the image of the ill-fated Queen: which is fine because there is a remarkable similarity of type even if the movie star, lacking the Habsburg lip, is much more beautiful - fortunately for us viewers.

Coppola's strong sense of what she did and did not want to do - this is the “getting of wisdom by a young girl”, not a biopic - saved the film from the tedium of some earlier historical movies: Hal Wallis's Mary Queen of Scots (1971) comes to mind. Glenda Jackson harrumphed as Queen Elizabeth and Vanessa Redgrave lamented as Mary in thoroughly predictable ways. Furthermore the film featured the notorious scene-that-never-was in which the two queens met, so it couldn't even claim to be an accurate picture.

This scene was first invented by Schiller in his play about Mary, and later used by Donizetti in his opera Maria Stuarda. It makes a wonderful contest on the stage with Mary finally losing her cool in front of the woman who can save her and denouncing her as the daughter of the “impure Anne Boleyn”: she calls Elizabeth “vil bastarda” (it sounds even better in Italian). But such a major rewriting of history can't really be justified in a second-rate historical movie, even if Schiller the genius is permitted anything.

Do any of its historical inaccuracies undermine The Other Boleyn Girl? I think not, in what is a rattling good romantic movie. Does The Other Boleyn Girl on the other hand give us something “vivid and memorable”, further to anything historians can do? I think not again. For there is one huge dimension missing from it. I mean a sense of religion, religious turbulence, spiritual conviction and all the immense changes brought about in England by the Reformation. Anne Boleyn was in fact an early “Protestant” to use a modern word, a patron of Lutheran preachers who introduced Henry to certain reformed religious texts. Her intelligence and strong character not only captured Henry but also enabled her to hang on to him by presenting herself as a powerful queenly figure, no longer a mere mistress.

Religion in The Other Boleyn Girl was presumably felt to be a killjoy subject compared to sex (lots and lots of it), realistic scenes of childbirth (maybe one too many - we have got the picture the first time in every sense of the word) and the political use of sex by the nobles surrounding the King. Whether or not Sir Thomas Boleyn and the Duke of Norfolk really instructed the girls explicitly how to act the whore in the cause of family advancement, the intention to use them politically was certainly there. Only the language is false to history. Furthermore, where language is concerned, there should surely be a lot of leeway given to the screenwriter. We don't want cod period language, even if there are always a few happily risible moments in historical movies. Genevieve Bujold as a previous Boleyn girl in Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) was responsible for one of my favourites: “Oh Henry,” she cries, “you great big royal booby!”

Here, Richard Burton as a sensational Henry - the part he was born to play - lingers in the mind during the formal court dance in which he captures the reluctant Anne as his partner (she's currently declining his sexual attentions): “Mistress,” purrs the alpha male, “you will dance to my tune.”

Fanny Ardent as Mary of Guise seducing John Knox with her thick French accent in the first Elizabeth film (1998), is another must for students of the genre. All this is not only fun but infinitely preferable to the laboured information-giving of Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) - alas, another dull movie on an extraordinary subject. I remember a scrap of dialogue that went: “Good morning, Stalin, I'm called Lenin and this is Kerenzsky.” Or something like that.

Peter Morgan makes no such mistake. He has Anne Boleyn respond to a banal question by the King about how she intends to ride her horse, with: “As usual, your Grace, with my thighs.” And why not?

However, the lack of any big idea in The Other Boleyn Girl, other than the fact that sisters are, well, sisters means that it never rises to the heights of the Great Historical Movie such as my all-time favourite in the genre, A Man for all Seasons (1966). This was Robert Bolt's play about Sir Thomas More and the young Henry VIII transformed into a fabulous movie with help from Paul Scofield and Robert Shaw. The painful dilemma of the individual's conscience versus his loyalty to the state unrolls before us with colour, drama and truth. You thrill to the movie, you agonise over the message. Compared to this, The Other Boleyn Girl - that's entertainment.