Barry Lyndon

When it was first released in 1975, Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon suffered the fate of being labelled (by Pauline Kael) a "coffee table movie" - like a coffee table book, oversized, too unwieldy for a paperweight or a doorstop, beautifully illustrated but otherwise useless. Many, even Kubrick fans, were puzzled at his choice of subject, after the technical wizardry of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the physical energy of A Clockwork Orange, both set in a not-too-distant (or not distant enough) future.

Thackeray's novel, serialized as The Luck of Barry Lyndon but published later as The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., is not up to his best work.(1) He labored over it and was only satisfied when it was finished. In Malta, on a journey he described in From Cornhill to Grand Cairo, he wrote in his journal "Wrote Barry but slowly and with great difficulty." "Wrote Barry with no more success than yesterday." "Finished Barry after great throes late at night." Intended as a throwback to the picaresque novels of Fielding and Richardson, it lacked the robustness and humor of the originals, and Redmond Barry's adventures are not very edifying. What goes up must invariably come down. But it is also a short novel, just two hundred pages with nineteen chapters. So it comes as no surprise to read Thackeray's title to chapter eleven "In Which The Luck Goes Against Barry".

Kubrick's adaptation of the novel required changes, the most obvious of which was dispensing with Barry's first person narration and creating a third person narrator. This alteration distances us from the narrative, which was clearly part of Kubrick's design. (A significant part of Kubrick's design with A Clockwork Orange was the retention of Alex's first person narration, which makes the viewer root, however reluctantly, for Alex.) It isn't that Barry is an unreliable narrator. Kubrick's narrator merely helps gloss over the scenes that Kubrick had deemed superfluous - or logistically impossible. Near the end of his tale, Barry says unapologetically of himself, "I am of the old school; was always a free liver and speaker; and, at least, if I did and said what I liked, was not so bad as many a canting scoundrel I know of who covers his foibles and sins, unsuspected, with a mask of holiness."

As for the film narrative, Kubrick follows Thackeray closely, without placing emphasis on one incident more than another. Some details are altered or eliminated. For example, in the novel Barry recognizes the Chevalier de Balibari to be his uncle, whereas in the film he is only a fellow Irishman. Also in the novel, Redmond, a child of Nora's (Barry's first love) to whom Barry is godfather (it is easy to infer, given his first name, that he is Barry's son) is the source of considerable trouble to Barry in the late stages of the story. And Lord Bullingdon is sent to America to fight the rebels, is reported killed, but returns to England, by then a Viscount. He delivers a thrashing to Barry, but there is no duel, Barry is not wounded and does not lose part of one leg. Barry dies in prison in the novel, but the film tells us nothing of him after his return to the Continent. Aside from its dramatic impact, Kubrick may have added the duel with Bullingdon because Andrew Robinson Stoney, the adventurer whose exploits inspired Thackeray to write his novel, had once fought a mock-duel to trick his titled lady into marrying him. The film leaves us believing that Lady Lyndon still loves Barry, whereas the situation in Thackeray is much more complicated.

In Kubrick's films, he seems to have been driven by problems of visualization, like how to intelligently depict ape-men as well as man-made space ships in their element, or how to realize a dystopian vision of a world deeply different from our own that yet appears only slightly different. With Barry Lyndon, Kubrick apparently wanted to reproduce an 18th-century Europe that exists today only in paintings from the period, and to do so while being faithful to the light that he saw in them. "Natural lighting" is a misleading term. It doesn't always mean using existing light, the light we can see with the naked eye. To capture that would require the use of "fast" film lenses with adjustable irises - opening the iris to let in more light the same way the iris in our eyes dilates when the light is low. For Barry Lyndon, Kubrick acquired a still camera lens developed by the German camera firm Zeiss for NASA that they used to photograph the dark side of the moon. Kubrick had the lens attached to his film camera and used it when he wanted to photograph any interior scenes lit entirely by candlelight. Exterior scenes that required more flexibility with available light were shot with Arriflex cameras.

When looking back on the making of the film and their experiences of working with Kubrick, Ryan O'Neal and Marisa Berenso tell us a great deal about his technique. He never planned his camera positions, which required an extra amount of waiting by his actors for the setups. He kept his principal actors under contract for months (the film took a year to shoot) and in costume on the set because he never knew when he might need them. And he refused to use stand-ins for matching shots where they were not even on camera. Ryan O'Neal, stupidly ridiculed for being so out of place in the lead role, mentioned that, once stumped for an idea during shooting, Kubrick consulted a coffee table book of reproductions of 18th century paintings and, finding a domestic scene of a man and a woman seated together, told O'Neal and Marisa Berenson (who impersonated Lady Lyndon) to sit just like the figures in the painting.

The climax of the film is Kubrick's only improvement on Thackeray. The duel in the dovecote between Barry and Bullingdon is superbly staged and executed, and provides the film with its parabola, from the first duel that set Barry on his adventures, to the last that effectively ends them. Barry is banished, paid off with an annuity. The narrator (the lovely voice of lovely old Michael Hordern) tells us: "Utterly baffled and beaten, what was the lonely and broken-hearted man to do? He took the annuity and returned to Ireland with his mother to complete his recovery. Sometime later he travelled abroad. His life there, we have not the means of following accurately. He appears to have resumed his former profession of a gambler, without his former success. He never saw Lady Lyndon again."

Kubrick's terse epilogue (a closing title before the end credits) isn't Thackeray's: "It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarelled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor they are all equal now. Thackeray's close is neither as sad nor as weak: "The [Lyndon] estate has vastly improved under his Lordship's [Bullingdon's] careful management. The trees in Hackton Park are all about forty years old, and the Irish property is rented in exceedingly small farms to the peasantry; who still entertain the stranger with stories of the daring and the devilry, and the wickedness and the fall of Barry Lyndon."

I have watched the film several times, in a movie theater when I was 17, on video and on dvd.(2) So, after more than three hours of breathlessly beautiful photography, what does Kubrick's film leave me with in 2018? I suspect that the varying critical appraisals in 1975 can be traced to the writers' attitude toward the setting which, like it or not, Kubrick brings to vibrant life. Vernon Young in The Hudson Review took the time to describe the scene of the closing duel in detail, and concluded: "Barry Lyndon, a work of great beauty, striped with the bizarre, is substantiated by its historical location; it takes place in Europe of the 1700s." Young, of a reactionary bent, loved Europe, even as he hated what it was becoming in the 1960s and '70s.

Pauline Kael was (in)famous for never watching a movie more than once and for always going with her gut reaction. (Roger Ebert was her worthy successor in this practice.) I doubt that her assessment of Barry Lyndon had anything to do with its failure at the box office - the only Kubrick film to suffer such a snub from filmgoers. But I'm afraid she got as close to the truth as anyone in the intervening 43 years. In The New Yorker she wrote: "This film is a masterpiece in every insignificant detail. Kubrick isn’t taking pictures in order to make movies, he’s making movies in order to take pictures. Barry Lyndon indicates that Kubrick is thinking through his camera, and that’s not really how good movies get made—though it’s what gives them their dynamism, if a director puts the images together vivifyingly, for an emotional impact."

Barry Lyndon is as useless as it is exquisite. I am not entirely utilitarian in my judgements. A film can serve no purpose whatsoever and still provide one with a rewarding expense of one's time. But, like the paintings that evidently inspired it, Barry Lyndon just sits there on the wall (or the screen) in beautiful repose. While it comes closest than any other film to capturing, not the look of the 18th century, but how the 18th century wanted us to see it, it is a series of tableaux non-vivants. So we get the architecture and the clothes and how they appeared without artificial lighting. Given the relative dark of drawing rooms lit entirely by burning candles, we can at last understand why everyone wore so much makeup - otherwise no one (not even a Zeiss lens) could see their faces. As for the wigs, none of the characters in the film appears to age, but their wigs turn grey. But isn't the reason why they wore wigs to conceal their true age?

Alfred Hitchcock once argued that complaining about the content of his films was like wondering whether the fruit in a still life painting was sweet or sour. But if the painter is any good, we would know from the fruit's appearance whether it was sweet or sour. In Barry Lyndon all the fruit is made of wax, with all the appearance of life, but inedible.

But it was also the last Kubrick film of any substance, however lifeless. His next film was The Shining, which is so overwrought that it fails miserably even as a horror movie. (I laughed when Jack Nicholson went berserk.) It made me wonder if Kubrick intended the film to elicit frights at all. Barry Lyndon was revived in theaters in 2016, prompting a new audience to marvel at it. I marvel at how precipitously movies have declined that audiences can now find Kubrick's lost art so marvelous.


(1) Thackeray was an enthusiastic gastronome. The facsimile of the 1886 edition of The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. that I have incorporates A Little Dinner at Timmin's, which presents Thackeray's talents at their best.
(2) Kubrick personally supervised and approved the video and digital transfers of all his films.