Barry Lyndon (1975)
April 6th, 2007
Directed by Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey), starring Ryan O’Neal (Love Story).
This is nothing like 2001: A Space Odyssey, that glorious outer-space acid epic of the Sixties.
Set in the 18th century, this is a picaresque tale of Barry (O’Neal), a young lad from Ireland, who moves up in the world by serving in the English and Prussian armies as a soldier and a spy, profits as a gambler, and marries a rich widow. In the second half he falls as fast as he rose by philandering and squandering his wife’s fortune. Engaging in a duel with his step-son, he loses a leg and is banished full circle back to Ireland, where he began.
That brief description might sound like a lot of action, and in fact there are three duels and several battles. (The battles and duels are of the suicidal 18th-century variety. In a duel, the fighters take turns shooting at each other. Usually the first to shoot wins and the other dies. In a battle, one army marches across a field toward the other, taking heavy fire all the way, hoping they will arrive with enough solders still standing to be able to put up a fight.)
But for a film that would seem to have so much action, Barry Lyndon is very long (3 hours) and curiously inert. O’Neal seldom smiles or shows any emotion at all. He drifts phlegmatically from one thing to the next, taking everything in his stride and seeming not to care about the outcome.
Although the American actor O’Neal is terrible in this movie, able to muster only the slightest trace of an Irish brogue, I don’t think the flatness of his performance is entirely his fault. He seems to have been directed to play the part that way. His job is to plod from one thing to the next, looking suitably handsome, aging from a teenager to a man in his fifties almost without benefit of makeup. In fact he looks almost the same in the end as he did in the beginning. He is both too old and too young for the part. (In the screenshot above of O’Neal aiming a duelling pistol, he is supposed to be a teenager.)
Visually and aurally the film is extremely beautiful. It specializes in long panoramas of the 18th century countryside and various European courts, accompanied by familiar music by Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, and others.
The costumes are lavish and they seem authentic. Both men and women sport elaborate wigs, powdery complexions, and pasted-on beauty marks like noxious moles.
I know I’m making this movie sound very boring, and one could definitely argue that it is. But I watched it over two nights because it is so long, and when the time for the second session neared I found that I was strongly anticipating submerging myself in it again. It drifts peacefully from one thing to the next in great beauty and without too much excitement, perhaps as we sometimes wish life would do.
I’m not sure why I didn’t see this movie in the 70’s. I guess I was busy. I recommend it for a sensual experience and to further your film education, but I don’t recommend it as highly as most of the reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes, who have given it a combined rating of 93%. Some of them call it Kubrick’s masterpiece. For that prize my vote goes to either 2001: A Space Odyssey or A Clockwork Orange.
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