Bad 'Girl': 'Boleyn' needs to be tarted up

What is the point of a bodice-ripper starring an actress who -- how to put this politely? -- doesn't have much to offer in the decolletage department?

In "The Other Boleyn Girl," Natalie Portman plays Anne Boleyn, as she schemes to persuade King Henry VIII (Eric Bana) to break with the Catholic Church and divorce Catherine of Aragon (Ana Torrent). It's a part that calls for a heaving bosom and a commanding presence, and the pixie- like Portman -- who, even at her most grown-up and hyper-sexualized, as in Wes Anderson's recent "The Darjeeling Limited," still looks like an androgynous 16-year-old -- has neither.

Then again, casting is definitely not the strong suit of "The Other Boleyn Girl," directed by Justin Chadwick (PBS' "Bleak House") and based on Philippa Gregory's best-selling historical novel. Squaring off against Portman is Scarlett Johansson as Anne's sister, Mary, who competes with Anne for the opportunity to bear Henry a son. The voluptuous, unabashedly tarty Johansson at least looks the part. But between her perpetually blank expression and her inability to sound like anything other than a husky-voiced American twentysomething, she makes an even bigger fool of herself than Portman.

And without two strong actresses at its center, well, "The Other Boleyn Girl" quickly devolves into tedium -- it's a catfight without claws. The story certainly offers promise: In the early 16th century, Sir Thomas Boleyn (Mark Rylance) schemes with his brother-in-law, The Duke of Norfolk (David Morrissey), to secure the Boleyn family's position with the king. They hatch a scheme to parade young Anne before Henry's wandering eye, but the plot backfires -- and Henry ends up taking the married Mary as his lover. Upon her return from banishment to France, however, Anne tries again to seduce Henry and this time she succeeds, driving a bitter wedge between her and her sister.

But even worse than the dreadful acting (for his part, Bana does little but glower) is the fact that Chadwick and screenwriter Peter Morgan ("The Queen") seem so intent on playing this material straight. Didn't anyone bother to tell them that Gregory's novel, while inspired by real events, is a whole lot of historical hooey and should be treated accordingly? By the time Anne is thrashing herself about her bed chambers and contemplating incest with her brother (Jim Sturgess), the film rightly should be a campy, tawdry delight. Instead, the filmmakers maintain a tone of turgid, junior-high-school-lecture solemnity.

A more experienced director, working with a better script, might have been able to make something of the strange feminist politics of Gregory's novel -- which seems to condemn a system in which young women are the political playthings of their fathers and uncles, even as the author celebrates the Boleyn girls' ability to use sex as a weapon. But these ideas get lost in a movie that's more interested in costume design and art direction than in character development and nuance.