TV Reviews : Style Overwhelms Content in ‘The Green Man’
“The Green Man,” a three-hour BBC movie playing on A&E; at 9 p.m. Sunday, is about lust and supernatural terror, based on a novel by Kingsley Amis and starring Albert Finney.
Those elements sound promising but the production is exasperating and the payoff is limp. The entire endeavor is a casebook study of style and panache over content.
Finney plays the rich host of a sprawling English manor called the Green Man. He’s an amusing host and philanderer, juggling sexual dalliances while he battles booze and the ghost of a 17th-Century Cambridge don (eerily visualized) who was notorious for ravishing chambermaids.
The best and scariest moment is the opening scene, when a young woman is eviscerated in a moonlit forest, with shuddering special effects as pointy tree branches come to life. After that the show grows increasingly repetitive and enervating.
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