Barry Lyndon (1975)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick, adapted from William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon, 1975.
Plot
Redmond Barry, a young Irishman of no fortune, duels over a cousin he loves, has to flee, joins the British army, deserts, joins the Prussian army, becomes a spy, teams up with a card-sharp called Chevalier de Balibari, and through a cold seduction marries the wealthy Lady Lyndon when her elderly husband dies. He takes her name — Barry Lyndon — and begins the work of burning through her fortune.
The second half is the fall. Barry spends lavishly trying to buy a peerage. He neglects his wife, takes mistresses, dotes on their young son Bryan while bullying his stepson Lord Bullingdon. Bryan dies in a riding accident. Lady Lyndon has a breakdown. Bullingdon returns to challenge Barry to a duel; Barry, in a small but decisive gesture of conscience, deliberately fires into the ground. Bullingdon does not. Barry loses a leg and, in the end, loses everything — title, wife, child, money — and is sent back to the continent on a stipend, a pensioner of the woman he married to ruin.
What It’s About
Barry Lyndon is the cinema’s greatest adaptation of Thackeray, and it carries all of Thackeray’s disillusioned social intelligence onto the screen. Like Vanity Fair, the film tracks an ambitious outsider (Barry is the male Becky Sharp) who learns the game of 18th-century European society and nearly wins — until the game reasserts itself and throws him out. Kubrick keeps Thackeray’s ironic third-person narrator (voiced by Michael Hordern) as the film’s controlling voice, which is a bold choice: it means the audience is always at one cool remove from Barry, watching him as a specimen rather than identifying with him.
The film looks like nothing else. Kubrick had NASA lenses modified so he could shoot interiors entirely by candlelight, which had never been done. The result is that every indoor scene looks like a Gainsborough or Reynolds painting come to life. The compositions are held for longer than comfortable, usually with figures small inside vast landscapes, because Kubrick wants you to feel Barry’s insignificance against the weight of institutions — aristocracy, army, marriage, inheritance law.
In Balzac’s terms, Barry Lyndon is a Comédie humaine set one generation earlier. The machinery of social rise and social destruction is the same. Money makes the man, and then unmakes him when he mistakes money for personhood. Kubrick is colder about it than Thackeray was; the film is almost anthropological.
Three hours long, patient, and — when it hits — devastating.
Connections
- Stanley Kubrick — his most visually radical film; the anti-Clockwork Orange
- William Makepeace Thackeray — the direct literary source; the ironic narrator survives intact
- Vanity Fair — the companion novel; same world, opposite gender of the climber
- Honoré de Balzac — the 19th-century continental equivalent of Thackeray’s social anatomy
Lineage
Predecessors: Thackeray’s novel; Fielding’s Tom Jones; Gainsborough and Reynolds portraiture; Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress.
Successors: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette; Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite; Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread; Albert Serra’s historical films; every arthouse period piece that prefers stillness to plot.