TV Reviews : Style Overwhelms Content in ‘The Green Man’
- Share via
“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.
The complete guide to home viewing
Get Screen Gab for everything about the TV shows and streaming movies everyone’s talking about.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
