untitled
BARRY
LYNDON
Written & Directed by: Stanley
Kubrick
Internet
Movie
Database Entry for full details
GRADE: A
1975.
Despite
his glowing reputation and relative improlificacy, there are still a
small number of Stanley Kubrick films that have fallen below the radar
of the casual cinephile; most of these are early efforts (Killer's Kiss, anyone?) but stuck in the belly of his hallowed oeuvre is an underseen and often undervalued classic: Barry Lyndon,
a flop upon its release that has struggled ever since to claim its
rightful place in popularity. While its proponents tend to hyperbolize
its distinction, calling it not only Kubrick's finest film but one of
the best ever made—it's neither—Barry Lyndon is
indeed a marvelous film that deserves a loftier position in the annals
of history and criticism, not to mention on the video store shelves.
Leon Vitali, who was Kubrick's assistant to his death and has a
supporting role in the film, laconically introduced the film recently
at Walter Reade in New York by saying, with tears in his eyes, "It
brings me great pleasure to say: this is Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, and I just know you're going to love it." As well you should.
Adapted from the novel of the same name by William Makepeace
Thackeray—an increasingly forgotten contemporary of
Dickens'—Kubrick's film maintains a literary character by being
divided into two "chapters" and using voice-overs from an omniscient
narrator (Michael Hordern). Ordinarily, narration is as anathema to
good filmmaking as Michael Bay, used as a cheap shorthand by
unimaginative and insecure directors, but Kubrick's narrator provides a
valuable ironic counterpoint to the on-screen images, as he'll go out
of his way to undermine a seemingly romantic or heroic scene with a
flippant remark, providing the film with a genuinely novelistic depth.
But Barry Lyndon is not a film of mere words, which Kubrick
emphasizes by allowing many scenes to play out silently, their
emotional content expressed only in gesture and facial expression;
Kubrick also maintains a proper level of cinematicality to counter the
literariness by composing, with his frequent cinematographical
collaborator John Alcott, some of the most impressive shots ever seen
in film, before and since. The compositions mimic famous paintings, and
contributing to the recreated pictorializations effect is that
oftentimes many of the characters, placed within the gorgeously
arranged tableaus, remain as stationary as the static figures on a
canvas. Alcott and Kubrick went to such meticulous lengths for
fashioning a proper period atmosphere that they even designed and built
their own special lenses, based on NASA technology designed for the
moon landings, that would be able to capture natural light; many scenes
are amazingly lit by candles alone, providing a startling naturalism to
the mise-en-scène. Beholding the stream of evocative images in Barry Lyndon is akin to a three hour walk through the Metropolitan Museum of Art while listening to a book on tape.
Even Barry Lyndon's detractors, however, would acknowledge the
mastery of its photography, as well as that of the Victorian production
and costume design. (Barry Lyndon marks the height of baroque set design in film; it's like Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons
taken to the next level, incidentally complemented by the Bach and
Vivaldi on the soundtrack.) Their gripes have more to do with its
extended running time (184 minutes), its deliberate pacing, and Ryan
O'Neal's lead performance. (We may also attribute American audiences'
reluctance to appreciate the film to a rejection of all things "too
English", as this is certainly Kubrick the expat's most thoroughly
British film.) In this regard, Barry Lyndon is nearly as divisive in its reception as Kubrick's swan song Eyes Wide Shut, another undervalued masterpiece. I won't bother arguing about the pace of Barry Lyndon—just
to say that it isn't "slow" by any means, and is never guilty of
superfluity—though I will mention O'Neal, as I think he's
unfairly maligned for his performance. He plays Redmond Barry, the
title character, a man of base birth who rises to a position of power
and influence only to fall back down, and O'Neal does so mostly with
appropriate reserve; in his scenes of youth, he conveys a convincingly
deep longing, an idealism informed by lustful and jealous impetuousness
that, through the course of the film, ages somewhat but never matures.
Barry winds up a scalawag among gentlemen and, as Jim Ridley recently noted in The Village Voice, "O'Neal's gauche inability to fit into the surroundings ultimately suits the role."
Barry Lyndon, divided in two by an intermission (unwelcomely
elided at the recent Lincoln Center screening), concerns Barry's rise
to title and his fall from grace; it's a tale of coming-up and
comeuppance. Part One is primarily a story of fate and chance; the
course of Barry's life is determined by a series of random fortunes,
starting with his escape from the law after, or so he's lead to
believe, killing a competing suitor (Leonard Rossiter) in a duel over
the love of his promiscuous cousin. The narrator bemuses about how
different Barry's life may have been had he not fallen for that girl,
or instigated the duel, as it's the starting point for a series of
contingent adventures: stopping for a drink of water, he attracts the
attention of bandits who happen to be at the same inn; losing his money
and horse to said bandits a bit down the road, he walks to the next
town, where he is recruited into King George's forces; deserting the
army, he finds an officer's uniform hung to a tree; traveling in that
uniform, he meets a buxom Prussian who takes him in; leaving her, he's
met on the road by a Prussian officer who catches him in his lie;
conscripted by the Prussians, he is assigned to spy on an effete
gambler who becomes his employer; and so on, all of these events
ultimately leading to Barry's meeting and marrying Lady Lyndon (Marisa
Berenson).
Part Two deals with Redmond Barry's, now Barry Lyndon, fall from the
status that he's married into. If Barry was brought up by chance, he is
brought down by action and poor decision, particularly the ill
treatment of his stepson (Vitali), and eventual mortal enemy; their
antagonism culminates in a dragged-out and unbearable duel, a sequence
accompanied by a ceaseless and unbearable beating of the timpani,
punctuated from time to time by violent string trills. Ritualized
violence plays a prominent role in Barry Lyndon, whether it's
the twisted custom of dueling, the ring formed by soldiers when Barry
boxes a man who embarrassed him, the gauntlet hazing of the Prussian
Army, or, most devastatingly, when a line of English soldiers marches
on the positioned French army, unflappable even as large numbers of
them are picked off. Never has war made less sense than it does in that
moment, and Barry thankfully gets it quick and runs off. While Barry Lyndon
is certainly a romantic film in some regard, it does not romanticize
violence, nor does it afford its characters with any sort of cheap
heroism—indeed, Barry is not a hero by any means, and Thackeray's
novel is considered by many to be the first English-language novel
without a respectable hero as its protagonist. War is grim, war is
fire, and war is death, an observation underlined by a sermon from the
narrator. (Cf. "It is well to dream of glorious war in a snug armchair
at home, but it is a very different thing to see it first at hand...")
The two sections of Barry Lyndon vaguely parallel one another,
up to a point at least; they both feature a session of fisticuffs,
instigated by an insult to Barry's hono[u]r, as well as Barry engaged
in a competition for the attentions of a woman—this time with his
stepson for his wife's—that ultimately results in pistols at
dawn. But while the Redmond Barry of Part One is a forgivable youth,
the Barry Lyndon of Part Two emerges as nothing short of a categorical
cad, mercilessly caning his insolent stepson and engaging in
extramarital affairs right under his wife's nose. In one scene, Barry
hovers lovingly over his wife and his newborn son, but Kubrick
immediately cuts to Barry osculating with two topless sexpots, neither
of whom happen to be his betrothed. Even Barry's mother, who in Part
One was a kindly Irish peasant, is by Part Two transformed into a
shrewy, manipulative Lady Macbeth type; she's used to help reveal
another of Barry Lyndon's many themes, the corruptibility of
stature. (Though the film is thematically dense, it's never convoluted,
and the clarity of its execution is a mark of its master director.)
Barry strives throughout the film to reach the level of gentlemanhood,
but once he does it destroys him; even his one redeemable
trait—his genuine and unqualified love for his son—proves
to be a deciding contributor to his undoing. "Behind my back I am
despised," Barry acknowledges near the film's conclusion, adding, "and
quite justifiably so." Barry Lyndon is the tragic tale, told
with grace and patience, of an antihero's decline, ruthlessly
concluding with Barry legless and alone; it's a melancholy reproach of
war and money, of polite society and powerful institutions. Sprawling
in length, ambition and thematic intent, it's an emotional epic and a
roaring success.
--
Henry Stewart
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Despite
his glowing reputation and relative improlificacy, there are still a
small number of Stanley Kubrick films that have fallen below the radar
of the casual cinephile; most of these are early efforts (Killer's Kiss, anyone?) but stuck in the belly of his hallowed oeuvre is an underseen and often undervalued classic: Barry Lyndon,
a flop upon its release that has struggled ever since to claim its
rightful place in popularity. While its proponents tend to hyperbolize
its distinction, calling it not only Kubrick's finest film but one of
the best ever made—it's neither—Barry Lyndon is
indeed a marvelous film that deserves a loftier position in the annals
of history and criticism, not to mention on the video store shelves.
Leon Vitali, who was Kubrick's assistant to his death and has a
supporting role in the film, laconically introduced the film recently
at Walter Reade in New York by saying, with tears in his eyes, "It
brings me great pleasure to say: this is Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, and I just know you're going to love it." As well you should.
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