Review of Barry Lyndon (1975) by Maineutral R — 06 Jul 2014

Stanley Kubrick is the master on slow films. He somehow makes slowness huge fun and admirably artsy. Also, his long tracking shots, calmed zoom-outs, large cinematography and telescopic wide angles are also part of his awesome slowness. Barry Lyndon is a great story, adapted from a novel by a great writer, produced by a great producer and directed by a great director; all of them are the one and only Stanley Kubrick, and this film is one of his more beautiful ones.

While the narrator can mostly be taken as "Exposition Man", the story still manages to be told well and with a pacing that it's both slow and normal on speed. Fast, it isn't, but that isn't a bad thing. Something I love from somewhat slow films is that they let you to breath into the world or the time period the film is, that way, you get more into the characters because you feel their world or time period. This is something very few films manage to do: Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey (another great Kubrick film), The first Hobbit movie by Peter Jackson; all these know how to tell a story and stop for some periods of time to let you live their world. Barry Lyndon is another great example of such slow story-telling.

When talking about Stanley Kubrick, it's impossible not to mention his filmmaking techniques, and each of his movies uses the same ones, but in a different way; kinda like uploading the same photo over and over, but using a different Instagram filter on each upload. In Barry Lyndon, Kubrick filmed this in such a way that each shot is like a living painting from the 17th century. This is ingeniously made by the use of natural lightning and no electric lights at all. There are scenes with candles lights being the only source of lightning on the shot, making the film much more in tone with the historical period it's presenting. With Barry Lyndon, Kubrick created another innovating cinematography method that also serves as a form of story-telling for the film, something I can't recall seeing in another film.

This is why Kubrick was the master: he was inventive and new, and because of it, his films were never as great on their time, making Kubrick a genius ahead of his own time. Kubrick, I hope you are resting well in the eternity, as now you are one of the greatest directors of all time. Barry Lyndon is such a beautiful film...there are few words I can use to talk about it. When you see it, its greatness speaks for itself on each shot, on each part of the story, on each change of scenario. Another great example of cinematic greatness from Stanley Kubrick, one of my favorite directors of all time.