**** (out of ****)
Starring Ryan O’Neal, Marisa Berenson, Hardy Krueger, and Patrick Magee.
Directed, produced, & written for the screen by Stanley Kubrick, from the novel by William Makepeace Thackeray.
1975 PG
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This is, without danger of hyperbole, one of the best-looking movies ever made. There are dozens of shots in this film worth hanging on your wall. Director Stanley Kubrick has actively set out to make a film that, in the words of my father, is “like an old painting come to life.” I honestly mistook some of the backgrounds for actual paintings. Yes, this means that the poises and motions of those involved will be contrived and not realistic. That doesn’t matter. The effect is stunning and gorgeous: the sets, the costumes, the lighting, and the way in which Kubrick’s characters—and they are his when they enter the universe he has created—move as if synchronized to the wonderful Baroque soundtrack. This is a masterpiece of aural and visual contrivance, a world of slow-moving figures in beautiful clothes surrounded by beautiful forests and palaces and homes, a world that is close to our own, but not. Not surprisingly “Barry Lyndon” won Oscars for costume design, makeup, art direction, and an extremely well-deserved award for cinematography, as well as similar awards from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, including best director. Despite the obvious obsession with the look, feel, and music of “Barry Lyndon,” Kubrick’s greatest accomplishment is that a human story emerges from this breathtaking milieu. A lesser director might be satisfied with a successful experiment of turning paintings to film, but not Kubrick.
The story is of an 18th-century Irishman named Redmond Barry, who eventually becomes known as Barry Lyndon. He is poor but descended from nobility, and while he may adopt some of the behaviors of nobility, he is an animal. He only cares for what is his and what he can make go his way. But he is a restrained and polished animal. He is self-destructive and short-sighted with the language and notions of a gentleman. In the course of the film, he is a soldier in two armies, a gambler, a drunk, fights a number of duels, and, finally, becomes nobility once again. But he is such an odd scoundrel because he has no impetus for self-examination, only the shallowness of an animal going from place to place in search of what he wants. I have read Thackeray’s novel and loved it but, like all of his films, Kubrick makes the story and its treatment all his own. As a result, Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon” isn’t so much plot-driven as it is a tour of Baroque Europe, including its beauty and its vices, seen through the mostly unperceptive eyes of a wayward rogue. Some viewers may be bothered by “Barry’s” seeming aimlessness, but a man like Redmond Barry could never become self-involved enough to notice he was part of a plot, and any more complications would have been beside the point.
Ryan O’Neal’s performance as Barry is intriguing. He does not spend time making different expressions or seeming to react to very much; he’s more like a dog watching things he can only partially understand. He’s obviously thoughtful, but his thoughts end prematurely. The rest of the cast is uniformly solid in their supporting roles, mostly as figures from the paintings of Hogarth or Rembrandt, and as such their effectiveness comes mostly from expression, mouth position, or how they hold their eyes. The film’s brilliant soundtrack—including Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, and Frederick the Great—becomes a character in itself, commenting on the action but at the same time holding itself apart, in the same way the social decorum of the time prefers restraint over emotion.
But I haven’t made apparent “Barry Lyndon’s” greatness; in truth, I’m not sure if I can. For the movie’s first two acts, we watch a visually-stunning Europe that once was and is now gone, and our sumptuous tour is uninterrupted by unnecessary plotting, until suddenly, in the third act, we are slapped with the realization that we have come to care about this rogue, this scoundrel, this misfit—we realize the simple but powerful truth that every human, no matter how ugly, deserves our compassion. I wouldn’t dream of revealing how this is accomplished, only to say that there is a scene of immense emotional power near the end that we wonder how Kubrick earned a reputation of being cold and detached. “Barry Lyndon” is one of the best films of 1975 and one of my most memorable cinematic experiences.
Finished February 2, 2002.
Copyright 2002 Friday & Saturday Night