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While the lives of the Tutors are sudsy, this soup opera is like chewing on a bar of Dove. The silky costumes and the refined accents don’t hide the melodramatic theatrics of something straight out of 1980’s DALLAS, not 16th century England. Anne Boleyn — or as my Anglophile aunt always refers to her, the Whore Queen — has never been more scheming as depicted in this affair. However, with the name THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL, shouldn’t this film have been about, well, the other Boleyn girl?

Word has trickled down that King Henry VIII (Eric Bana, THE HULK) is disgruntled with his wife Katherine’s inability to produce a male heir. Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk (David Morrissey, BASIC INSTINCT 2) sees an opportunity to put a female relative into the view of the king’s wandering eye, enlisting his brother Sir Thomas Boleyn (Mark Rylance, ANGELS AND INSECTS) to pimp out one of his girls for the greater good of the family. Anne (Natalie Portman, CLOSER) is chosen to be the bait, but when she makes some errors in dealing with the king, Henry’s eye falls on her married sister Mary (Scarlett Johansson, GHOST WORLD). Soon the family has riches from the king, but Sir Thomas’ wife Elizabeth (Kristin Scott Thomas, THE ENGLISH PATIENT) wonders how long it will last before the king tires of his new conquest.

The problems begin with the adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s book to the screen. Equal blame I suppose falls on screenwriter Peter Morgan and director Justin Chadwick. At just under two hours, the story clips along so fast that little time is dedicated to character. Anne’s conniving seems all they are interested in. Mary moves from married to the mistress of the king to the spurned love of Henry so quickly that when she says she loved him we don’t believe it. Anne does some vile things to her sister, but all is forgotten in a flash, just so the plot can continue. If you have ever seen the Showtime series, THE TUTORS, it will be hard not to think of it while watching this movie. While THE TUTORS is also an unabashed soup opera, it took two seasons to develop the affair of Henry and Anne, never having to resort to ridiculously contrived scenes where a sister woos a king right outside the room where another sister is giving birth to the king’s child.

Now back to the title, the film starts out to be about Mary, but lazily falls back on the conventions of a King Henry VIII tale, dealing with his affair with Anne. The whole point of the book, which I have not read but receive information from a good source, was to look at how Mary figured into this historic drama. The film seems to say she was shoved to the side.