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Barry Lyndon
Carpets and pictures
1975
Review: June 29, 2007
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Starring: Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Krüger
Would be delightful, but then again, this is pretty long.
THE SETUP:
The life of one Redmond Barry.
DISCUSSION:
I had seen this a few years ago and been absolutely enchanted by it, so when I saw it was playing at Lincoln Center I gathered my friend I had been telling about it for years and we ran off to one of its many sold-out showings.
Ryan O’Neal stars as Redmond Barry, this Irish lad who is a total doofus when we first meet him. Word is that O’Neal was purposely cast against all these refined European actors in order to make him stand out all the more. We first meet him desperately in love with his cousin Nora. She puts a ribbon between her breasts, then tells him he can keep it if he finds it, that he is licensed to search everywhere on her person in order to find it, and that she “will think very little of you if you cannot find it.” He looks at her like a confused pouty moron, not feeling around at all, then says “I cannot find it.” His doofusness continues as he becomes enraged that Nora is also flirting with this rich British military officer, her marriage to whom would bring a considerable annuity to her struggling family. Barry almost screws it up with his immature, puppyish sincerity, then messes it up again when he learns that Nora and the officer are to be married. He challenges the officer to a duel! O’Neal is fantastic in these early scenes [actually I thought he was great throughout] with his paralyzed, immature but sincere face.
Spoilers come early here, because the movie takes many unexpected turns, so you may want to protect your innocence about where this is going. But skip down past the end spoiler mark as we’ll talk about some more general things that won’t ruin the plot for you.
SPOILERS > > >
So they have the duel, and Barry kills the officer! Making her family furious at him for losing their income, and losing him Nora’s hand anyway, because he now has to flee to Dublin or face the police! So his mother gives him all her money and a horse—both of which he is promptly robbed of. Penniless, he joins a British regiment he comes across. There is a brief scene in which he has a fight with a guy much larger than he, and we see that while he’s an idiot, he’s a real killer with his fists and pistol.
One day he’s walking along and overhears two male soldiers nude in the river expressing their devotion to each other. So surprise, two gay soldiers all of a sudden. Barry overhears that one of them has messages and traveling papers, so Barry steals his papers and his horse and deserts!
He soon runs into the Prussians, who expose him as a deserter and force him to join their ranks. These, we are told, are the scum of the country, and it is said that Barry learns much from them. He becomes friends with a senior officer, is soon sent to spy on a French nobleman, then deserts the Prussians and sides with the nobleman, and is soon delivered out of the country and to England. Please be aware that I may be screwing all of these countries and armies and ranks up and offering you complete misinformation. Thanks.
Anyway, soon Barry meets the beautiful Lady Lyndon, married to this older man in a wheelchair. Barry, now a sly and cunning adult, flirts with the woman and eventually marries her. This begins part two, which takes up matters quite different from the first.
From the start, we are told that Barry treats his wife like the many pretty “carpets and pictures” that form the backdrop of his life. His adopted son from her first marriage, Lord Bullingdon, hates him from the start and is furious at his mother for marrying him so hastily, shades of Hamlet.
Soon Barry and Lady Lyndon have their own child, and there are some humorous scenes in which we see how much Barry prefers his own child to his stepson. Things proceed, with his wife growing more estranged and tormented, his stepson despising him more and more, him doting ever more on his hideous brat child, and him racking up more debt for Lady Lyndon to cover. I’ll leave the rest for you to discover.
< < < SPOILERS END
It’s just a wonderful film—if it could be shaved by about 20 minutes. The tone is arch and humorous throughout, there are many surprising reversals, and the ones that aren’t surprising are satisfying in how right they seem. Barry himself has the same arc with the audience as Macbeth: You root for him at first, even though he’s first a nincompoop and then a scoundrel, but by the end of the movie you hate him and are eager to see him get his comeuppance. When I first saw it I thought O’Neal was a good choice simply based on how out of it he is, i.e. not from anything to do with his performance, but this time I was more impressed with him as an actor and believed his character throughout.
One especially notable thing about this movie is the lighting. I had first heard that this movie was filmed entirely with natural light, but apparently that’s not true—it was filmed with light made to look natural. The effect is quite noticeable from the start, with daytime scenes having a flatness not common in movies, but which actually works to give the settings and scenes an authentic feel. There are several interior scenes filmed only with candlelight, using the largest aperture opening for the time and special lenses. And it’s not hard to notice that many of the shots were modeled after paintings of the period. This movie justifiably won best cinematography for 1975.
Apparently Kubrick had done a lot of research for a film about Napoleon, but Waterloo came out and flopped, so his financiers pulled his money. He wanted to do an adaptation of Vanity Fair, but around that time there was a TV miniseries of it, so he chose this book, all of this in part to make use of the large amount of research he had done for Napoleon. He apparently made many changes to the book, most notably changing the narrator from Barry himself, speaking in a comic tone and delivering unreliable facts, to an omniscient narrator who is simply wry. The movie also ends several years before the novel, as apparently Barry spends his last 21 years in prison in the novel, and supposedly writes his memoir—the novel—while there.
Anyway, a great movie for anyone, but especially those who love elaborate costume dramas and adaptations of English Literature.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
Yes.
