In The Other Boleyn Girl, sisters Anne (Natalie Portman, left) and Mary Boleyn (Scarlett Johansson) are rivals for the love of King Henry VIII.

Columbia Pictures/Focus Features’

Anyone who has a nodding acquaintance with British history knows Anne Boleyn.

King Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church so he could divorce his wife to marry Anne in hopes that she would give him something Queen Catherine of Aragon apparently could not — a male heir. But after Anne produced another daughter for him and her next two pregnancies ended in miscarriages, Henry tossed her aside on charges of adultery and incest, later having her beheaded at the Tower of London.

But The Other Boleyn Girl recounts the story of Anne’s younger sister, Mary, who was encouraged by their weak-willed social-climbing father and her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, to begin an affair with King Henry in hopes of improving their status at court.

Who knew?

Sex, money, social status and politics are the key ingredients in The Other Boleyn Girl, which makes 16th-century England look like a hedonistic playground. Yet despite all the film’s sex and greed and even hints of incest, too much of it plays like an elaborate history lesson. Where’s the passion, particularly from Eric Bana’s Henry? He broods and muses and dances around the edges of the story, but never quite takes center stage.

And although the film’s title character is Scarlett Johansson’s Mary, it’s Natalie Portman’s Anne who is in charge. She’s headstrong and willful, a woman who can send back some outrageously gaudy bauble that Henry has sent her, refusing to take it — or him — until he can shed Catherine and make Anne his queen in her stead. Of course, too, there’s Anne’s inevitable date with the swordsman at the end of her story, made even more tragic because here she’s seen as having been wrongly convicted of adultery and incest with her brother, which turns her into a sympathetic figure.

All that Mary can do is protest being marketed by her own father and uncle to the king, and shortly after she has happily married someone else. Why, Henry has even bought off Mary’s new husband with a position at court. Mary eventually acquiesces to everyone’s demands to become the king’s concubine, but she does it so sweetly that she comes off looking positively saintly.

The Other Boleyn Girl stays fairly close to historical records for the most part. In real life, several other men were accused of adultery with the queen and beheaded in addition to her brother, George (Jim Sturgess). George was tried alongside Anne (his own wife, whom he despised, testified against him) and, despite the lack of evidence, both were found guilty. Unlike the film, where a crowd of onlookers watch as the sword slices through Anne’s neck, in real life her beheading was a private affair. Mary’s return to London to petition the king for her sister’s life may be something cooked up by the screenwriter for dramatic effect. It may have been deemed a dramatic necessity for by the time Mary reappears, she has been absent from the movie for such a long time that one may have forgotten that the title is The Other Boleyn Girl.

Despite the slow pacing, especially in the middle of the film, and an overall lack of fire (see the 1969 film Anne of the Thousand Days starring Genevieve Bujold as Anne and Richard Burton as Henry VIII for that), history buffs will have a field day discovering nuances to a story they thought they knew well. Especially good are the scenes in which Anne and Mary’s father (Mark Rylance) pushes for his daughters to make powerful matches for themselves, much to the disapproval of his wife (Kristin Scott Thomas) who married for love. Anne learned that lesson well. For, as she says just before the dam burst on her life, “Love is of no value without power and position.” Unfortunately for Anne, her final position was kneeling in front of a swordsman’s blade.

***The Other Boleyn Girl

Starring: Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Eric Bana.

Rated: PG-13, contains sexual situations, violence, adult themes.

mjanuson@projo.com