Barry Lyndon (1975)

Barry Lyndon could almost be described as Kubrick's only 'dud' - it showed poorly at the box office and was received with less than enthusiastic response from the moviegoing world. But for once, the critics saved Kubrick's skin, instead proclaiming the film a masterpiece and a genuine classic, even though it is Kubrick's least known movie.

From the opening shot, an incredibly slow but so breathtakingly beautiful steadicam pan over an 18th century landscape, the audiences knows they are in for something special. The man of the moment is, as the movie title refers, Barry Lyndon, or as is he known in the film, Redmond Barry, and the film is really a portrayal with his very own battle with life. Unfortunately, his battle has suddenly become even harder, for one good reason. His struggle to attain for himself, to become captain of his soul, is to be framed by Kubrick. Barry is to become trapped in a work of art, a prisoner in the ice palace that Kubrick shapes out of every one of his films, but most especially in this one. Because, for the first time, we see Kubrick devoting his entire thought processes and all his filmmaking genius onto the one man.

As you may have figured already, Barry Lyndon is the film-adapted biography of Redmond Barry, originally written by William Makepeace Thackery in his 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon and split into two parts in the film. Kubrick provides the viewer with a fairly drole narrator, the voice of Michael Hordern, who sets us in the past, and more importantly, in the past tense. In many ways, he tells us what is going to happen next, and that is precisely what Kubrick intends; Barry is forever doomed to tell us the past in the present, just like the metaphorical film loop of life, expect in this case, Barry's life is precisely that - a film loop. Throughout part I it is the landscape, not the people within the landscape, that dominate the picture. Let us remember that this is a time when people have not completely overrun nature, unlike today, but still, it is a time when everything seems so composed. This is perhaps the most noticeable feature of the film - everything seems so arranged, be it by unseen hands, (e.g. the marriage of Nora and Captain Quin, and Barry's incomparable luck at cards), by destiny or fate, (the deaths of Bryan, Grogan and Sir Charles Lyndon), and of course, the hands of the mentor, the overlooker, Stanley Kubrick.

Kubrick rarely moves the camera during this film. In what has become a trademark of his filmmaking style, seen perhaps most of all in The Shining, is the stately zoom in-zoom out composition of the character in the midst of the shot - most of the time that person is Barry, for it is his story. The elements of each shot are locked together in precisely maintained pattern within the frame, increasing the sense of design and destiny with the viewers mind. But at the same time the camera involves itself with the object in question, retaining the god-like voice of the narrator. The characters present themselves within the frame as if the camera is a painting, and they are the subjects of the painting. It is a world within a rectangle.

In the light of his inevitable Part II failure, it seems touching that Barry must try so hard to overcome his fate during Part I. He fights numerous one-on-one battles, marries into a wealthy, respectable family and tries his heart out to become the gentlemen whom we all know he will never be. The narrator himself even seals Barry's fate at the beginning of Part II: "But fate had determined that he should leave none of his race behind him, and that he should die alone and penniless". The entirity of Part II is the ticking mechanism; ticking towards the conclusion, Barry's fate. Whilst constantly saying over and over to himself, "never to fall below the rank of a gentlemen", he repeatedly fails, but with one exception, in a certain scene created not by Thackery, but by Kubrick. At the climax of his duel with Lord Bullington, he has the choice to act nobly and as a gentlemen, and it is precisely what he chooses. Almost surrounded by an aura of ease and grace the likes of which we never see Barry for the rest of the film, he shoots his pistol into the ground rather than into Bullington. It is truly a gripping scene; for once, Barry is the gentlemen - be it a self-righteous title or not; and Bullington is made out to be vulgar.