Review of Barry Lyndon (1975) by Arseniy V — 15 Dec 2012

In a lot of ways, Barry Lyndon is very different from Stanley Kubrick's other films; in other ways, it's very similar to them. It's probably the least talked-about of his films these days, but it's still great in its own simultaneously grandiose and austere ways. Don't ever try to watch it when you're sleepy, though.

The film is an epic, 3-hour 18th-century period piece adapted from a picaresque novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. Like other picaresques, it doesn't really have a plot, but it does have a story: it follows the life of one Redmond Barry (later Barry Lyndon), who works his way up the social ladder almost by accident. Barry isn't a particularly noble or even interesting person; he's just some shmuck who happens to be in the right place at the right time, for the most part.

Kubrick films all of this with big, ornate compositions that remind one of 18th-century paintings; I found myself thinking about William Hogarth during a couple of scenes. In fact, the whole thing is kind of like a movie version of Hogarth's series "A Rake's Progress." The exteriors are often grand and truly beautiful, and the interior night scenes were apparently filmed with actual candle light and nothing else. The film, which won the Oscar in its year for Best Cinematography, holds up better visually than almost any other 1970s film I can think of. The music, which also won an Oscar, is adapted from a wide variety of classical composers. This is definitely one of the most elaborate and technically interesting period pieces ever made.

And yet the story is very deliberately told, about a character we are not particularly encouraged to care about, having a life that, the film seems to suggest, ultimately doesn't mean much. We know Ryan O'Neal was capable of expressive acting - he was in Paper Moon just two years earlier. Yet here, Kubrick seems to have encouraged O'Neal to portray a basically blank person with no character or personality. All of the film's grand, precise presentational formality contrasts with this seemingly empty narrative, in which many incidents occur, but none of them seem to contribute to any bigger pattern. That, no doubt, is the point, and in this way the film articulates Kubrick's cold, intellectual, anti-humanist point of view just as effectively as do 2001 and The Shining. It just does so in a very different way, with very different content, than either of those films do. Ultimately, this isn't one of my favorite Kubrick films by a long shot, but I can certainly see how it fits in to his body of work.