Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Starring Ryan O’Neal and Marisa Berenson
The Northwest Film Center in Portland, Oregon is currently hosting a Stanley Kubrick retrospective at the Portland Art Museum. The series offers eager fans a unique opportunity to chart Kubrick’s development as a director, as well as to see some of his lesser-known films on the big screen. For me, the highlight of the series is Barry Lyndon, a little-seen gem of Kubrick’s oeuvre that I’d been dying to watch properly projected in a theater since I can remember.
A hipster friend once told me Kubrick was his favorite director. I asked him if he liked Barry Lyndon. “Barry who?” was the answer, confirming my suspicion that Lyndon is an underrated work even among Kubrick devotees. I can understand. Despite being a period-piece based on a picturesque adventure novel, Lyndon is as aggressively experimental as Kubrick’s previous film, A Clockwork Orange, and does not reward the passive or impatient viewer.
Thwarted in his desire to film a Napoleon biopic, Kubrick turned to William Makepeace Thackeray for inspiration and the result is an arrestingly beautiful, strangely haunting, and thoroughly original work of cinematic art. In two parts separated by an intermission, Barry Lyndon follows the rise and fall of one Redmond Barry, an 18th century Irishman whose good looks, ingratiating manners, talent for fighting, and cutthroat ambition mark him for something “greater” in life than tending farms. During the course of the narrative, Redmond duels an Englishman, joins the regiment afoot, deserts, gets dragooned into the Prussian army, becomes a Prussian spy, escapes again, takes up the profession of gambling, travels the Continent in the company of a Chevalier, and pursues a nobleman’s wife.
And that’s just the first part. Sounds like an exciting romp, doesn’t it? Er, actually — it’s not. For all its visual pomp and splendor, Barry Lyndon remains one of the strangest, most idiosyncratic films I’ve ever seen. Ask almost anyone who has seen the movie (a paltry number to begin with) and most will tell you that Barry Lyndon is, in a word, boring.
It’s true that Kubrick’s deliberately slow pacing seems like a gauntlet thrown in the face of filmgoers weaned on fast-paced and predictable cinematic storytelling. Yet the effect, at least for me, is more mesmerizing than yawn-inducing. Kubrick’s mastery of the film medium is such that he recklessly breaks all rules of movie storytelling and yet I’m hypnotized by the painterly images and evocative classical soundtrack.
Kubrick lingers on glowing, soft-focused images as if he can’t bear to look away, as if he’s intoxicated by the simple act of looking. Lyndon is an embarrassment of visual riches, from the lush green landscape of Ireland to the candle-lit interiors of European courts and palaces. Virtually every shot of the movie could be framed and mounted on the wall. Barry Lyndon belongs on a shortlist of the most physically ravishing films ever made and is worth seeing for that reason alone. It’s pure cinema, distilled to a gorgeous interplay of sight and sound.
Kubrick stretches film time to the breaking point, collapsing months and years into a few shots and then drawing out fleeting moments for a seeming eternity. Redmond’s seduction of Lady Lyndon, for example, is a wordless sequence that travels from the gaming table to an outside veranda in a breathtaking ballet of glances, meaningful expressions, unspoken emotions, and quiet gestures. Social ritual fascinates Kubrick, and much of the drama of the story stems from the tension between violent passion and society’s restrictive formalities.
Yet it’s not all filmic experimentation and weighty themes. Barry Lyndon’s early, Ireland-set scenes feature stunning scenery and a lovely, lilting theme composed by that great Celtic band, the Chieftains. The humor is dry-as-dust and dark-as-midnight, the kind of humor Kubrick specializes in (remember a little satire called Dr. Strangelove?). When Redmond encounters a famous highway robber, Captain Feeny, he pleads with Feeny to let him keep his money, which his mother gave to him, telling him “I’m just one step ahead of the law myself. I killed an English officer in a duel, and I’m on my way to Dublin until things cool down.”
Captain Feeny: Mr. Barry, in my profession we hear many such stories. Yours is one of the most intriguing and touching I’ve heard in many weeks. Nevertheless, I’m afraid I cannot grant your request. But I’ll tell you what I will do. I’ll allow you to keep those fine pair of boots which in normal circumstances I would have for myself. The next town is only 5 miles away, and I suggest you now start walking.
Redmond: Mightn’t I be allowed to keep my horse?
Captain Feeny: I should like to oblige you, but with people like us, we must be able to travel faster than our clients. Good day, young sir.
This delightfully understated exchange showcases Kubrick’s subtle sense-of-humor, an often overlooked feature of his films. Barry Lyndon is also one of the director’s most humane films, a characteristic conspicuously absent from some of his later work. Kubrick delights in colorful supporting characters played by such scene-stealing actors as Hardy Kruger, Patrick Magee, and Leonard Rossiter. As for Kubrick’s purportedly “clinical” absence of emotion, there’s a scene towards the end of the film between Redmond and his ailing young son that is emotionally devastating, and one of the few scenes guaranteed to make me reach for the Kleenex box.
Ryan O’Neal, never known as a great actor (to put it mildly), is nevertheless perfectly suited to the part of the rogue-ish Redmond Barry. As in the aforementioned scene with his son, O’Neal digs deep to give a powerful, convincing performance that maintains a high quality over the course of the movie’s 3-hour running time. Though his Lucky Charms Irish accent comes and goes, O’Neal captures an essential innocence and sweetness to the character that allows the audience to keep with him through thick-and-thin. His social climbing doesn’t seem so much the result of a Machiavellian plan as the result of spur-of-the-moment opportunism. In the climax of the film, a stunning duel that takes place in an abandoned barn, Redmond makes a choice that demonstrates the distance he’s traveled from his first impetuous duel with the Englishman. In that moment, Redmond deserves the name of hero. O’Neal himself must have known Barry Lyndon was a career highlight: he named his son Redmond.
Because of its slow pace and storytelling idiosyncracies, I’m always hesitant to recommend Barry Lyndon. Yet I can’t help myself. Though not for all tastes, Lyndon is that rare cinematic beast: a truly personal expression by a formidable artist. Its rewards are rich and abiding.
