Review – The Lion in Winter

Wow, and I thought get-togethers with my family at Christmas were bad. At least nobody (as far as I know) in my family ever sat around plotting to kill one another. Not so, apparently, with Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitane and their sons. The script is the major defect in this production; it plays like a play, which of course is precisely what it was before it was brought with insufficient adaptation to the silver screen. Further, the dialogue rockets back and forth between mushy and biting so rapidly that it almost becomes the medieval, royal version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe? The acting’s hammy, but it would almost be disappointing if that wasn’t so. And certainly in terms of gender relations it’s very much a creature of its own times. Mildly amusing