(revised)
**** (out of ****)
Starring Ryan O’Neal, Marisa Berenson, Hardy Krueger, and Patrick Magee, narrated by Michael Hordern
Directed & written for the screen by Stanley Kubrick, from the novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, with photography by John Alcott
1975
183 min PG
(The following is a revision of an earlier review.)
Like an old painting come to life, Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon” is one of the best-looking movies ever made. It has dozens of shots worth hanging on your wall. I honestly mistook some of the backgrounds for actual paintings. The film is shot entirely with natural light—sun, fires, and candles—and Kubrick is said to have consulted NASA technicians about the development of camera lenses that would do so. The resulting imagery is as gauzy and rich in color as the paintings of the 18th century European masters who inspired it. The pictures do so much talking that dialogue is spartan and subtitles are unnecessary. The leading lady hardly has a word. Does that mean that the poises and movements of the characters involved are not what we would call realistic? Yes, but that’s the point.
Some filmmakers strive for realism—and good for them—while others strive to create self-contained worlds the likes of which we’ve never seen. George Lucas does so with special effects, David Mamet, in a less obvious way, accomplishes this through heightened language and narrative flippancy, and the Coen Brothers do so with intense peculiarity. In the hermetic, hypnotic, and achingly beautiful world of “Barry Lyndon,” it’s not enough that we see a story unfold before a gorgeous background. Our characters become one people with the architecture and the portraits around them, as if the walls, candelabra, and endless array of curlicues gave birth to them. This is a masterpiece of aural and visual contrivance, a world of slow-moving and stilted figures in beautiful clothes surrounded by beautiful forests and palaces and homes, stepping from one perfectly and delicately mannered pose to the next.
So the question is “why?” When Pauline Kael decried “Barry Lyndon” as a “three-hour slide show for history majors” one suspects it’s the three hours that bothers her, not the slide show. If there were no other point to it, we could tolerate 90 minutes of golden hypnosis but maybe not much more (the hypnotic, brain-melting “Russian Ark” only clocks in at 96 minutes). The answer is Kubrick’s favorite theme: dehumanization, that is, the deprivation of our ability to examine and choose situations for ourselves. “2001: A Space Odyssey” shows technology and the worship of reason reducing us to robots. “Eyes Wide Shut” shows the unexamined routine of marriage in a similar light. “Full Metal Jacket” shows the bravura, façades, and mindgames that soldiers play in order to kill as making them less than men.
For “Barry Lyndon,” Kubrick is not so much interested in William Thackeray’s jouncy picaresque as he is in examining the ultimate vehicle for dehumanization: social ritual. The manmade world was never as codified, as ritualized, and as stringent as in the time of “Barry Lyndon.” Music, dance, architecture, fashion, gardens, religion—everything was plotted along the same perfect lines. Every minute of every day from sun-up to sundown, from the cradle to the grave, had been rigidly prescribed, and there was nothing for a man to do but move from one painting to the next, from one beautiful setting to another.
The resulting film is a brilliant marriage of style and substance. There is only one scene of dancing in the whole film, but there are so many scenes that might as well be danced; there are so many footsteps and movements that seem set to the Baroque soundtrack by Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi. “Barry Lyndon’s” music, which won the now-defunct Oscar for Adapted Score, has much more to say than any of its people. While ritualized, heavily conformist societies are usually portrayed on film as cold, robotic, and uninviting (like Kubrick’s own “2001”), the allure of the world of “Barry Lyndon” is unmistakable: sure, every second of every day is prescribed, but doesn’t it look like a pretty place to live?
(And, of course, we sure like to think that we don’t live that way anymore…)
The story is of an 18th-century Irishman named Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal), who eventually becomes known as Barry Lyndon. He is penniless 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 will be a soldier in two armies, a gambler, a drunk, a duelist, and, finally, nobility once again. But he is such an odd scoundrel because he has no impetus for self-examination, only the shallowness of a beast going from place to place in search of what he wants.
As a result, Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon,” like the Thackeray novel, isn’t so much plot-driven as it is a tour of the hypocritical luxuries 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 this could never become self-involved enough to notice he was part of a plot. Any more complications would have been beside the point.
Kubrick may have abandoned the bounciness of Thackeray’s spirit, but he retains Thackeray’s ironic style, in which so many elements of the picaresque are turned upside-down. Aiding him is the driest narrator the movies have ever heard (Michael Hordern), whose understatements and wild exaggerations are delivered in an indifferent deadpan. He is like a tour guide who knows the story that connects all the paintings in the gallery, and his deeply set irony is itself many times tantamount to lying. The movie is not much interested in story things, like what will happen next or whether or not we like the characters, because a movie that criticizes social conventions only weakens itself by obeying too many fictional conventions. Kael mistakes this for Kubrick “suppress[ing] most of the active elements that make movies pleasurable.”
Page two of "Barry Lyndon." Back to home.