Justin Chadwick (2008)
Justin Chadwick – whose direction of (part of) the BBC television adaptation of Bleak House (2005) found a good way of getting across the cliffhanger aspect of the episodic publication of the original – can’t find a satisfying style here. The characters aren’t convincing either on a realistic level or in a self-confidently anachronistic (Lion in Winter) mode; and the film is stuck between trying to create a claustrophobic drama and a historical epic. The need to show that the production budget is well spent results in plenty of visual historical-drama cliché (characters thundering up and down tenebrous palace corridors, horses galloping urgently through forest and stretches of water). There are endless significant glances and scenes of plotting. But there are also some good performances. As Mary Boleyn, Scarlett Johansson’s passive quality makes her seem a genuine innocent at the start and enables her to awaken and respond credibly to the melodramatically changing situation. Mark Rylance gives a thoughtful performance as her father, trying to do his best by his family – and implying strongly that desperate, scheming advancement was a way of Tudor life for a man in his position.
Eric Bana as Henry VIII is excellent at suggesting a man with more power than strength of personality and a guilty conscience that he finds it harder and harder to conceal. At the point at which Mary goes to the court to be his whore, his subtlety and tenderness are as surprising to the audience as to her. There’s a real connection between Johansson and Bana, which isn’t lost even when the film starts speeding towards its pretty laughable conclusion. The same isn’t true of Bana’s scenes with Natalie Portman as Anne Boleyn; the film starts to go really wrong at the point that Anne returns from her banishment in France and Henry remarks, as she performs daringly to the court, that she’s changed a lot. Portman – overdoing the confrontational flirting – seems just the same as when she first met the king and didn’t have the same spellbinding effect on him. You never believe he’s obsessed with her. Unlike Johansson, Portman seems hemmed in by her English accent. With Kristin Scott Thomas as the girls’ mother and David Morrissey, in a poor, monotonous performance as the Duke of Norfolk. Peter Morgan’s screenplay has its moments and also its ridiculous moments (especially when Mary gives birth to Henry’s illegitimate son and it’s Anne who has to tell her father and Norfolk that this won’t seal the family’s fortune).
9 March 2008
