Barry Lyndon

Barry Lyndon; drama / art-film, UK, 1975; D: Stanley Kubrick, S: Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Krüger, Steven Berkoff, Gay Hamilton, Marie Kean

Ireland, 18th century. After his father dies in a duel, Redmond falls in love with his niece Nora, but she loves Quinn. In a duel, Redmond shoots Quinn, runs away in Dublin and gets robbed. He enlists into the English army from which he escapes in order to have an affair with a German woman, a widowed mother, and then enters the Prussian army. There he saves a general and gets the assignment to spy the Irish man Chevalier, who ironically becomes his best friend in Sachsen. The two of them run away to England where they cheat at playing cards. Redmond marries the rich Countess Lyndon and starts hating her son. After his biological son dies from a fall of a horse, Redmond enters a duel with the Countess' son, looses a leg and leaves England as a poor man.

Historical drama "Barry Lyndon" depicting the circumstances of people in the 18th century, is a slightly overrated and dated film. It's definitely a very intimate, surprisingly emotional piece from Stanley Kubrick about a tragic hero that goes through life like a toy of fate, with enough impressive scenes, like when Nora hides her scarf in her cleavage and then demands from Barry to "search her" and find it any way he wants—it is an incredibly romantic and tender sequence for Kubrick, wonderfully summing up that feeling of first love. Sadly, some 20 minutes into the film, after the duel, Nora disappears from the story and never comes back, yet all the new characters are a poor substitute for her superior charm, and just walk in the shadow of her absence. Despite this and another highly emotional moment (the death of Lyndon's little child, who tells him and his mother "not to quarrel, so as to meet again in heaven"), Kubrick distantly and half-heartedly directed the 3-hour story, in a conventional way, without the sharp visual style from his previous films, even though his composition of frames are easily recognizable, from the centered objects to the neat architectural symmetry. 

Not only that, but Barry Lyndon is a rather lukewarm, one-dimensional figure from which we don't discover his thoughts or feelings, and the actor Ryan O'Neal is a mediocre choice to play him. The storyline is a vague set of episodes, of which some work better, but some less. In one scene, Barry is hired by the Prussians to spy the Irishman Chevalier who said something in Irish, and then the narrator says: "Barry was so touched by his native language that many won't understand his following reaction"; then Barry starts crying and confesses everything to him, and the two of them become friends, showing Irish camaraderie. As a servant, he secretly observes the cards of his rivals in a card game and gives him signals (by cleaning the table, for instance), thus it is sad that the charming Chevalier too soon and inexplicably disappears half way into the film. So many characters just come and go, without any lasting effect on the story, which in the end seems like it's directed in ellipses. While there are some inspired bits in the first half, the second half plays out like a straight soap opera. "Barry Lyndon" is an aesthetic film (the natural light is used even during the night sequences, where rooms are "imperfectly" illuminated by candles) about the randomness of human existence, but it is simply too often boring. One really has to wonder what Kubrick would have made out of Napoleon, his dream project that was scrapped and then replaced for this film.

Grade:++