Barry Lyndon

Barry Lyndon is part of "my canon," a totally arbitrary and subjective list of my 100 favorite movies. For reviews of other movies on this list, look for the Top 100 category on the right sidebar. 

Barry Lyndon begins with a killing—the murder of Barry’s father in a gentlemanly pistol duel. Observed in a static long shot that sees the minuscule characters dwarfed by an awe-inspiring landscape, this opening scene is a perfect encapsulation of the film to come. Barry’s father is killed as the result of a disputed horse sale, a narrator dryly informs us—a seemingly insignificant motivation for murder that suggests the “civilized” violence of 18th-century Britain, as well as the cruel twists of fate that lead to either wealth or ruination. As we’ll see, this opening pistol duel also foreshadows the climactic standoff between Barry Lyndon (Ryan O’Neal) and his stepson, Lord Bullingdon (Leon Vitali), as the sins of fathers are cruelly revisited upon their sons. Finally, the distanced, impersonal vantage point of this opening duel seems to corroborate the common claim that Stanley Kubrick was a cold formalist indifferent to the characters who occupy his frame—though this often wasn’t the case, and certainly isn’t true of Barry Lyndon.

Based on William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon, Kubrick’s adaptation is split into two “acts.” The first—“By What Means Redmond Barry Acquired the Style and Title of Barry Lyndon”—follows a charming but ineffectual Irish roué after he first leaves his modest family home. Seduced by his cousin, the fickle Nora Brady (Gay Hamilton), Barry is devastated when she leaves him for the dandified British soldier John Quin (Leonard Rossiter), who resembles (in both his crimson wardrobe and prancing airs) a peacock forever hoping to attract a mate. After shooting Quin in a duel (the second of many in the film), Barry is forced to abscond to Dublin, where the constraints of poverty force him to enlist in the British army.

Barry’s regiment is sent to Germany in the midst of the Seven Years’ War, whereupon the senseless bloodshed of warfare (including the death of a family friend) leads Barry to avow that he will seek only a life of wealth and stature. He spies his chance when he encounters a British courier, steals his horse and identification papers, and hightails it to Holland—though he’s stopped en route by a Prussian Captain who will return Barry to the British army (which will surely execute him for desertion) if he doesn't join Prussian forces. This is how the Irishman Redmond Barry proceeds to fight for the British and Prussian armies during the course of the same war—an irony that points out how little national allegiance means both to Barry and to the armies who enlist him, though nationalism is the ostensible motivation for war in the first place.

A further series of events, dominated either by fate or mere happenstance rather than human causation, has Barry working as an agent for the Prussian army, keeping tabs on the foppish gambler Chevalier de Balibari (Patrick Magee), who himself might be a French spy. Yet Barry almost immediately reveals to the Chevalier that he is an Irishman working for the Prussian army, ultimately becoming the Chevalier's accomplice in his duplicitous schemes to cheat massive fortunes out of Europe’s noblemen. The narrator informs us that it is Irish brotherhood that compels Barry to align himself with the Chevalier (who also turns out to have Irish heritage), though the audience—recalling Barry’s inner vow to attain wealth at the earliest opportunity—suspects that it is the Chevalier’s lavish mansion and elegant clothing that are the real motivations. In any case, it is as the Chevalier’s right hand that Barry ultimately meets Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson), the beautiful wife of the aged, decrepit Sir Charles Lyndon (Frank Middlemass), and seduces her shortly before the old man dies in a hideous coughing fit. His marriage to the Countess of Lyndon ensures that Barry will acquire the fortune he has so thirstily (if ineffectually) craved.

This first half of the film is similar in tone to Thackeray’s source novel, which satirizes the pomposity of 18th-century warfare and societal mores. After all, in desiring social stature above all else, Barry is merely perpetuating the values that dictated European civility in his time. Barry Lyndon has a reputation as a cold, stuffy costume epic, but the first hour and a half is wickedly funny; aside from Dr. Strangelove, Act I of Barry Lyndon counts as Kubrick’s only comedy. Not unlike Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963), the machismo and vanity of a supposedly civilized era provide plenty of opportunities for caustic wit. This especially comes through in Captain John Quin’s ridiculous attempts at virile brawn (his perpetually upturned lip is hilarious in itself) and the polite highwayman who robs Barry of twenty guineas, graciously allowing him to keep his boots as he forces him to walk the rest of the way to Dublin.

But if Act I of the film is drolly amusing, Act II tragically returns to the axiom that money is the root of all evil. After marrying a beautiful countess and attaining a vast fortune through the least possible effort, Barry’s life falls into ruins, flooded with hardship and misery. He openly flaunts his infidelity and spends most of Lady Lyndon’s money on outsized expenditures (including some of the most expensive paintings in Europe), all the while forcing his wife to remain secluded in their opulent estate. The countess’ ten-year-old son by Sir Charles, Lord Bullingdon, despises his stepfather and considers him (rightly) a disloyal opportunist. Barry and the Countess have a son of their own, Bryan, whom Barry dotes on adoringly, yet the spoiled boy is killed in a horse-riding accident. The tragedy sends a grief-stricken Barry into alcoholism and Lady Lyndon into a pious religious zeal, thus ostracizing both of them from their noble peers. Ultimately, Barry’s downfall is swift and all-consuming: penniless, loveless, and missing a leg—the result of yet another pistol duel—Barry is forced to leave England and never return. In a shockingly sad turn of events, the only remaining connection between Barry Lyndon and the Countess is the annual annuity checks that she signs in order to ensure his permanent exile: if money initially ensured Barry’s attraction to (and maybe even love for) the beautiful Countess, it is money that will remain their only trivial tether.

The theme that rampant greed destroys everything in its path is a common one, though it’s conveyed with especially tragic power in Barry Lyndon. A subtext of greater interest in the film is existential: is it fate, destiny, mere chance, or human agency that controls our lives? Given the narrator’s repeated allusions to fate, one might assume that Barry’s bleak downfall was preordained before he even existed: “Fate had determined that [Barry] should leave none of his race behind him, and that he should finish his life poor, lonely and childless,” prophesies the voiceover early in the film. Barry’s astonishing lack of initiative would seem to verify this point—he must be one of the most passive antiheroes in all of cinema. Things happen to Barry Lyndon; he rarely instigates them. True, the entire plot is set in motion when Barry challenges Captain Quin to a duel for the affections of his cousin; but it was she who seduced Barry in the first place (by daring him to fetch a ribbon from her cleavage) and stoked his jealousy. From then on, Barry stumbles from one situation to the next; he joins the British and Prussian armies only because he happens upon them, and allies with the Chevalier because he is forced to spy on him by his superiors. He has no need to seek out his future wife, as she miraculously sits across from him at a gambling table; and he seduces her merely by kissing her wordlessly (in a ravishingly gorgeous scene). 

And yet, just when we think Kubrick has no faith whatsoever in human agency, choices are made which determine the outcome of Barry’s life. (Warning: major spoilers lie ahead.​) It is not, in fact, fate that solidifies his downfall; the climactic pistol duel with Lord Bullingdon (an episode absent from Thackeray’s novel) is especially important in this regard. Barry has a choice: he can easily kill his stepson, and thus inherit Lady Lyndon’s fortune (depleted though it may be). That Barry mercifully chooses not to fire upon Lord Bullingdon seals his fate; for better or worse, it is one of the only ethical decisions that he consciously makes in the film.

It might seem that Barry Lyndon proves Kubrick’s lack of emotion, his indifference (or even abhorrence) towards his characters. His detractors have often claimed that Kubrick’s meticulous style, his bitter bemusement at his characters’ actions, prove how disinterested he is in the human experience. Certain moments in Barry Lyndon might suggest this, most notably the death of Sir Charles Lyndon, which arrives exactly when he venomously accuses Barry of cuckolding him: as we watch Sir Charles search desperately for his array of pills, the narrator begins voicing an obituary allegedly printed in London newspapers days later—though this voiceover fades out abruptly into the film’s Intermission, seemingly ridiculing both this character’s life and death. 

But if Kubrick’s attitude towards his characters verges on misanthropy, there is sympathy in his cynicism. At the very least, he identifies with their confusion at the incomprehensibility of life, and with the combustible emotions we experience in our deepest despair. One scene late in the film is a turning point: following the death of young Bryan, we observe a black-cloaked Lady Lyndon, consumed by misery, kneeling at a church altar, austerely praying. Many shots in Barry Lyndon begin with a medium-shot or close-up and then steadily zoom backwards, moving from the personal to a tableau. Yet this moment is one of the few in which the camera zooms inwards, towards Lady Lyndon, clearly identifying with her all-consuming grief. It is with the countess that the final shot of the film identifies as well: the camera is unmoving as it registers her stormy emotions, which she stoically (and unsuccessfully) tries to conceal. She has been taught by society to strive for calm reserve, for meek subservience; yet this “civilized” impassivity has led her to a life of sadness.

While Barry Lyndon was received somewhat coldly upon its release, both commercially and critically, its stylistic accomplishments have never been in doubt. Such claims often sound hyperbolic, but it's no exaggeration to call Barry Lyndon one of the most visually stunning films ever made. Kubrick’s copious period research (conducted when he was initially planning his biopic of Napoleon, following 2001: A Space Odyssey) is manifested in the astounding costume design (by Ulla-Britt Söderlund and Milena Canonero), art direction (by Ken Adam, Roy Walker, and Vernon Dixon), and cinematography (by John Alcott), all of which won Academy Awards. Though based in historical detail, each stylistic decision serves the film’s emotional tone: certain palatial foyers carry an empty opulence, while the Chevalier du Balibari’s ostentatious costumes portray a man forever desperate to prove his own significance. 

Much has been made of the technical innovations that went into John Alcott’s cinematography, most notably the re-engineered Zeiss 50mm lenses that enabled shooting in candlelit interiors with no other artificial lighting. (The narrow depth of field necessitated by these lenses results in a soft focus for many interior nighttime shots, recreating the dreamy intimacy of such 18th-century painters as William Hogarth.) Yet the cinematography is stunning not only for its visual beauty, but for its uniqueness and intelligence. Kubrick’s indebtedness to painting has never been more pronounced, as the movies' frequent backward zooms seem to highlight the emotional volatility taking place within discreet fragments of classic pre-Romantic paintings (in addition to Hogarth, Barry Lyndon’s aesthetic recalls the work of Antoine Watteau and Thomas Gainsborough). It bears remembering that Kubrick began as a still photographer, and was therefore well-versed in the different resonances that moving and still images can convey. One of Barry Lyndon’s most fascinating ambitions is to propel landscape painting into motion, to hint towards the dramas that might be playing out in the scenes created by the classical masters.

Barry Lyndon’s initially tepid reception has been refashioned since its original release in 1975; Jonathan Rosenbaum, Martin Scorsese, and Roger Ebert have all championed the film’s richness, allowing the film to take its place among Kubrick’s finest. It may be flawed—the two acts of the film are jarringly distinct, and certain plotlines are emotionally tepid thanks to Kubrick’s steely remove—but to paraphrase Jean Renoir, no masterpiece is perfect, and most masterpieces are made more interesting by their imperfections. Each time I rewatch Barry Lyndon, I become more convinced that this is Kubrick’s most eternally rewarding film: less mind-bending than 2001, less haunting than Eyes Wide Shut, less timely than Dr. Strangelove, but with more mysteries and oddities smuggled into its ravishing frame. It is simply (and profoundly) the story of a man stumbling through life, thinking he's in control yet constantly reminded of his own powerlessness. What could be more universal than that?

Originally published by Joyless Creatures (December 20, 2013). 

Top 100

Barry Lyndon

​Grade: A

Runtime: 185m.
Countries: UK/USA
US Release: December 18, 1975 

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Producer: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Stanley Kubrick, William Makepeace Thackeray (novel)
Cinematography: John Alcott
Editor: Tony Lawson
Cast: Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Kruger, Steven Berkoff, Gay Hamilton, Marie Kean, Diana Koerner, Murray Melvin, Frank Middlemass, Andre Morell, Arthur O'Sullivan, Godfrey Quigley, Leonard Rossiter