Movie Review: Barry Lyndon

Herein is contained a review of the film Barry Lyndon, its title character’s rise and fall, its methods, and its view of the world.

Every once in a while during Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 costume drama, a title card like that will fade onto the screen, announcing the film’s intentions. The movie also has a narrator, a voice of calm British detachment who tells us what turns the plot will take long before they arrive. Clearly, the movie is not interested in keeping us in suspense, and even without the narrator’s help we sense the direction the story is taking. The movie chronicles several years in the life of its title character, observing his transformation from a penniless Irish nobody into a member of the 18th century British nobility and his subsequent return to his original status. But the events of the movie are not as important as the movie’s attitude towards them, and as observed by its director they are a long, empty endeavor devoid of any human warmth or meaning.

It’s definitely a Stanley Kubrick movie.

The movie’s bleakly ironic outlook is established in its first shot. Two men are seen in an extreme long shot, staring each other down from opposite edges of the screen. They are each pointing guns at the other. The narrator informs us that Barry Lyndon, born Redford Berry, was the son of a lawyer and was destined for a great future in the law… Pop! A shot rings out and one of the men falls dead. …had his father not been killed in a duel. Already, Kubrick has made clear how little value life has in this universe. We never see the men’s faces; their persons are tiny against the daytime horizon. We have only known Barry’s father for the space of a single shot, not long enough to sympathize with his fate. And even if we knew him better, the calmly mannered narration lets us know that his death is something to be observed rather than mourned. Kubrick will cultivate and encourage this level of detachment throughout the length of the film.

One of the principle ways he does this is through the photography. In the early stretches of the movie, Kubrick often shoots his characters from far away, isolating them within large, beautifully panoramic shots of the English and Irish country-sides. There are vast, foggy Irish moors and verdant English hills; the movie soaks up landscape. These shots are wonderful to look at, sometimes seeming more like paintings than moving images, but their austerity sets an example the characters in the story cannot quite live up to. The life of Barry Lyndon is one filled with power plays and petty grievances, and neither he nor anyone else seems to notice the natural beauty around them. In one early passage, Barry has an awkward lover’s quarrel with his cousin Nora, who is leaving him for an older, richer English captain. They squabble in one corner of the screen as we look past them to a lake so picturesque it might as well have been painted right onto the film. Kubrick always finds a way to prevent us from getting too involved in the character’s plights.

Barry uses one opportunistic trick after another to improve his status in life. He goes from an Irish farmhand to an English soldier, from an army deserter to a professional gambler and finally to a member of the English upper class after he woos and marries Lady Lyndon, an aristocrat’s daughter and heir to a large fortune. At this point the film leaves the wide-open spaces of the first half and retreats into interiors. Much has been made of the fact that many of these scenes, in particular those lit by candle-light, used no artificial lighting whatsoever. Perhaps because of the limitations inherent in using such low-light conditions, the actors in these shots are barely allowed to move but for small jerks of their heads and hands. As the earlier exterior shots resembled landscape paintings, so do these interiors resemble precisely arranged still-lifes. The characters are quite literally trapped in space, posed for our viewing pleasure. They have only their faces to express themselves.

Curious then that the actors seem to have been directed to look as blank as possible. Kubrick has chosen as his principal players Ryan O’Neil and Marisa Berenson, who play Barry and Lady Lyndon respectively. O’Neil was a heartthrob at the time the movie was made, and Kubrick uses his matinee good looks as a kind of mask to cover whatever thought might be stewing inside Barry’s head. The narrator tells us that Barry is angry, or sad, or in love, but O’Neil’s face doesn’t change very much, and his voice doesn’t rise. As Lady Lyndon, Marisa Berenson is even more an impassive figure. In one shot, Kubrick slowly zooms out on her face as she sits, elegantly posed in her period dress, on a sofa. The narrator tells us that she feels depressed because of Barry’s philandering, but we can’t help but think that she looks like nothing so much as part of the furniture.


If all of this talk of detachment sounds critical of the film, it is not meant to be. Most movies are fascinated with their characters. They want to get to know them, and they want the audience to sympathize with their problems. In Barry Lyndon, Kubrick all but dares the audience to keep as great an emotional distance from the characters as possible. The events of Barry Lyndon are the stuff of high adventure. Over the course of his life, Barry is robbed at gunpoint, participates in the Seven Years War, becomes a Prussian spy, marries into opulence and fights not one but two gentlemanly duels to the death. Yet all of it is regarded with as much interest as are cornfields passing outside of a car window. The movie discourages audience involvement to the point of being audacious.

So what does the movie gain by separating itself so thoroughly from the audience? It draws our attention to the sumptuously photographed environments, for one thing. But its main function, I think, is to present us with a certain point of view. By robbing us of suspense, by photographing the story so dispassionately, and by giving us performances more mannequin than method, Kubrick gives us no choice but to view the storied life of Barry Lyndon with cool indifference. It is an attitude that seeps into the audience throughout the movie, and perhaps even lingers afterward. It is an attitude that most movies, even most Kubrick movies, do not engender.

Kubrick never really made films that were autobiographical, but this one strikes me as one of his most personal. His movies were often criticized for being cold and lifeless. With Barry Lyndon, he admits that while this may be so, that does not make them any less worthwhile. It merely means that while most movies see the world one way, his movies see it another.