The luck of Barry Lyndon

My thoughts on Kubrick's masterpiece at 50

This is a version of a piece that I published in The Spectator World earlier this year. Barry Lyndon remains a film that is utterly fascinating, as deep a dive into the past as I can ever imagine watching. Unlike all the sanitised Austen adaptations that we endure on an annual, even biannual basis, it’s a picture wholly alive to the squalor, nastiness and sheer arbitrary horror of 18th century Europe. John Alcott’s cinematography demands to be seen on a big screen, and this week’s re-release will allow cineastes to do just that. I can’t recommend it enough.

Shortly after Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Thackeray’s novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon was released in American cinemas in 1975, it was mercilessly parodied in the satirical publication MAD magazine. Over seven pages, ‘Borey Lyndon’, as it was called, was treated as an embarrassing flop, something to be ridiculed and regretted.

The opening caption set the tone: “So you think Historical Movies are a thing of the past?! So you think no one wants to see Costume Epics any more?! So you think they’re too dull and slow-moving to hold your interest?! Then you probably just woke up after seeing this latest dull extravaganza! Well…here’s a chance to be put back to sleep – with MAD’s even duller version of ‘Borey Lyndon’!”

It is not recorded how Kubrick reacted to the assault on his picture. He would undoubtedly have read it, being punctilious about collecting every review or comment piece in the press, and so some Warner Brothers staffer would have had the unwelcome responsibility of mailing the filmmaker the unflattering magazine.

In truth, Kubrick was hardly flavor of the month at the studio, anyway. Although Barry Lyndon would end up being nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning four, it missed out on the major accolades (it was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s year instead) and was not a commercial hit. Made for a budget of $11 million, it did not even cover its costs in the United States, where it needed to make $30 million to earn a profit, although it had greater success in Europe and internationally.

For years after its release – probably up until, and beyond, Kubrick’s death in 1999 – Barry Lyndon had a curious reputation. One of the reasons why Kubrick was given such autonomy and respect by Warners – including 40% of the gross profits of his films, an unbelievable amount – was because his pictures made money. 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and The Shining were all vastly profitable, especially the first two, and his reputation was such that his subsequent films, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut, would become financially successful, despite being, by most standards, deliberately paced, narratively opaque and intellectually demanding.

Yet Barry Lyndon didn’t make money, was roundly ridiculed – not least for the casting of the American actor Ryan O’Neal as the Irishman Redmond Barry – and was better known for the MAD parody than for its own merits. For decades, it was regarded as the one true flop in Kubrick’s mature career, a tasteful but stilted exercise in ossified nostalgia. It was believed to possess all the dramatic impetus of a tortuous guided tour of an overstuffed museum, complete with knowingly fruity narration by the British actor Michael Hordern.

Now, however, it has undergone a considerable revival in popular and critical reaction. It is particularly beloved by filmmakers. Everyone from Martin Scorsese to Akira Kurosawa has lauded it, and in the most recent Sight and Sound poll of directors, it was ranked as the twelfth greatest film ever made, only beaten in Kubrick’s own filmography by 2001, which topped the poll. It has been homaged (some would say ripped off) by countless other pictures and directors. The much-acclaimed Cate Blanchett drama Tár, which has a similar rise-and-fall structure, was described by one wag as being “By what means Linda Tarr acquired the style and title of Lydia Tár”, followed by its second half “Containing an account of the misfortunes and disasters which befell Lydia Tár”, both references to Kubrick’s film’s bleakly foreboding title cards.

Lars von Trier’s minimalist Dogme-syle epics Dogville and Manderlay, complete with omniscient John Hurt voiceovers, were both clearly inspired on a formal level by Barry Lyndon. It has been more influential on period filmmaking than any other film of the past half-century – the works of Merchant Ivory would barely exist without it – and, to cap it all, The Simpsons has parodied it, surely the greatest badge of honor for a picture like this.

[INSERT DROP CAP] In fact, Barry Lyndon is now so highly rated that, like many of Kubrick’s films, it is almost in danger of being overrated, a corrective to the years of reputational neglect that it suffered. Yet unlike many examples of Great Cinema, it is compulsively watchable, being frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious (people often forget that Kubrick made two of the funniest black comedies of all time in the forms of Dr Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange) and, by the end, deeply moving. It is three hours long, and those hours pass by in the blink of an eye. Just as 2001 is the closest, at least before Elon Musk pulls his finger out and normalizes commercial intergalactic travel, that most of us will ever come to travelling into space, as Barry Lyndon is the picture that most clearly conveys what life in the eighteenth century must have been like in all its beauty, squalor and occasional terror.

The film’s storyline is reasonably straightforward. Redmond Barry is an impoverished and immature young man who goes on the run after mistakenly believing that he has killed his cousin’s suitor in a duel, and ends up fighting in the Seven Years’ War on the British side, before semi-accidentally defecting to the Prussians. After many shenanigans that include his briefly working as a spy, Barry meets and falls in opportunistic love with an aristocrat, Lady Lyndon, and assumes the title of Barry Lyndon. However, his repeated infidelities, stormy relationship with his stepson Viscount Bullingdon and eventual tragic death of his son Bryan lead to his ostracization from society. After an act of misplaced decency during a duel results in his losing his leg, he is thrown out of the situation which he has taken such pains to acquire.

The film’s major aesthetic appeal does not so much lie in its narrative, however, but in its mise-en-scène. Kubrick famously demanded that the cinematographer John Alcott – who deservedly won an Oscar – be able to shoot interior scenes by candlelight, resulting in technical advances that rivalled 2001 for innovation. The lenses used had to be specially developed by NASA in order to capture deep space, and so it was barely a stretch for the technology to be adapted to Kubrick’s own version of the eighteenth century. And the director made it clear to his collaborators that his major visual influences would be the artists of the period, including Gainsborough’s portraits, Hogarth’s satirical etchings and Constable’s landscapes.

Many other filmmakers would have suggested this and then settled for second-best, but Kubrick was not a man given to compromise or disappointment. If he wished for a shooting schedule that would stretch to nearly a year and encompass filming in many of Ireland and Britain’s finest and most famous stately homes, his wishes had to be agreed to. Even a death threat from the IRA, resulting in his hurried departure from Ireland, did nothing to stint the enthusiasm that he felt for the project, which came about, phoenix-like, from the ruins of his once-treasured, eventually aborted film about Napoleon. Barry Lyndon was conceived in late 1972, began filming in early 1973 and was eventually completed in the spring of 1974. By its director’s standards, this was almost speedy.

Save O’Neal, then a Hollywood ‘name’ thanks to the success of Love Story, it did not feature starry actors, but instead Kubrick assembled an impressive retinue of Anglo-Irish character actors, many of whom he had worked with on A Clockwork Orange and who often possessed the appropriate period complexion that he wanted. (Marisa Berenson, a model who played Lady Lyndon, was specifically asked to stay out of the sun for months so that she would look like one of the pallid women who stare, entrapped, out of the portraits of the time.) The casting pays off magnificently. Whether it's Beckett regular Patrick Magee, playwright-actor Steven Berkoff, Kubrick’s frequent collaborator Philip Stone or even the much-loved British comic performer Leonard Rossiter, this is a film of faces; lived-in, covetous, sly, lustful, angry and often intoxicated faces.

It’s also extraordinarily moving at points: more so than any of Kubrick’s other films. Although the casting of O’Neal was ridiculed at the time, his still, intentionally stiff performance allows the audience a rare degree of detachment from the character, allowing us to observe his rise and fall with equanimity. This is shattered in the picture’s second half when Barry, otherwise at his most unsympathetic and boorish, loses his son after the boy is killed in a riding accident (the horse, naturally, being a careless and ill-considered present from his father). The scene in which Barry tearfully tells Bryan his favorite bedtime story on his deathbed is the most purely affecting sequence that Kubrick ever shot, and a valuable corrective to all those who would lazily describe him as a cold man who made cold films.

Barry Lyndon has aged spectacularly well, as have virtually all of Kubrick’s pictures. It is a fascinating exercise in the aesthetic and creative potential of technical cinema – in a decade that was probably the greatest ever time for American film, it’s up there with the very highest accomplishments – but also has the well-paced and engaging qualities of a particularly good book, as well as something less tangible and harder to explain. Kubrick himself said of the film that “the most important parts…are the mysterious parts – beyond the reach of reason and language.” We are beguiled by Barry Lyndon in part because, as with The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut, it is impossible to have all the answers on first, second or third viewing.

This sense of enigma – of the past being an intangible foreign country, something to be examined but never experienced – seeps into the film’s DNA and makes it a consistently fascinating, even thrilling, experience. I have regularly described Barry Lyndon as my favorite film, and have seen it more times than I care to remember. And not one of those viewings has been anything other than revelatory, intriguing and worthwhile, as well, inevitably, as deeply sad. Sorry, MAD magazine; ‘Borey Lyndon’ ended up being the masterpiece of a peerless film-maker. One-nil to Kubrick, then.