BARRY LYNDON @ 50

Naive Irish boy Redmond Barry is swindled into leaving town so that his rival can claim the woman they both fancy, then he is victim to highwaymen who strip him of all the wealth on his person, so he joins the army, doing well enough in it to desert and impersonate an officer whose meeting with a Prussian counterpart ends in exposure and back to the ranks of the Prussian army and .... you get the idea. It's the 18th century and Stanley Kubrick wants to take you for a holiday there as you watch a figure rise and then fall in such a way that you will feel caressed by the art of it and engaged by its lessons for the late 20th century. How'd that go?

Well, the reason this title is condemned, along with Lolita, to the bottom of the pile, below the early noirs and even his debut which he himself derided, is largely due to his great faithfulness to his source and its era. He added plot points and altered the person of the narrator but the real star was, having convinced us he'd shot a film out near Juptier, the journey back to 18th century Europe. Kubrick was expected to get that right. If wooden cameras with supersonic oil paint masters inside them had been possible that's how he would have done it. But what we get is an intriguing mix of contemporary technology (including from NASA again) and an appreciation of the look of the era as evidenced in the painting of the time, served, as always with music of place and perfection.

It's important to remember (or be informed) that Thackeray's original novel was itself in fancy dress. It was done in the style of a Fielding or Smollet, a beefy mix of fortune soldiery, knavery and gentility for a readership eager for the lot. By setting his story among the high born powdered wigs when he'd never worn one himself allowed him to indulge in a near endless judgement of both noble and humble players after their death. Thackeray wasn't born until the 18th century was dead eleven years. He could thus take literary pot shots at anyone contemporary with the distraction of a wildly unreliable narrator (Barry himself) moving among a costumed cast of characters. Who'd care to sue?

For Kubrick, the themes beckoned of frustrated sons and father figures, self aggrandisement and the old stalwart of fate and opportunism that filled the pages of Tom Jones and Roderick Random back i' the day. Also, he was charged with outdoing the massively successful Tony Richardson adaptation of Tom Jones. He not only did that, he might well have killed it as a setting.

For his vehicle-in-chief Kubrick chose the celebrated fence post Ryan O'Neal, an actor who needed an extraordinary director to draw him out beyond his native beauty. O'Neal's counter in the role of Lady Lyndon was Marissa Berenson, one of the ubermodels of the mid-70s. The rest of the cast is almost entirely every British RADA graduate from the previous decade up to the production year who serve as strongly as the massive paintings in the lofty halls of the rich in many scenes of this film.

The music would be a series of adaptions of the works of the composers of the Late Baroque/Classical period like Handel and the only-just anachronistic Franz Schubert. With the harpsichord piece Sarabande expanded to an orchestral scale for the voice of fate and the aching lilt of Schubert's piano theme from a his trio in E-flat to celebrate love among the syllabubs and candles, as well as a host of less modest blarings of fanfares and symphonic movements, the constant music of the time, blanding with the more poignant bucolic folk for the rustic scenes, the sound stage is set.

And, of course, this film doesn't just look good it is almost constantly as gorgeous as a gallery of period correct landscapes and opulent interiors. The latter are often served by the use of the NASA-developed lenses that offered the widest aperture in film history so that the candlelight is just that, candlelight, not electric lighting  supplemented by a host of pretty wax sticks. It took a moon landing to make the 18th century convince us.

So, pretty scenes and powerful music aside, is it any good? Well, those themes of fatherhood and aggradnisement persist and always work. The scenes of military fighting feel documentary as do scenes of emotional and physical violence. When the peaks are reached, they impress. The problem is that there are too few peaks. There's a lot of ogling of beautiful landscapes and ostentatious houses but so little of anything else to allow us to forget we are in for three hours of this.

Ryan O'Neal's impassivity is deliberate, his face's perfection can allow us to write upon it what we get from a particular scene, remembering, as Barry does, his class predicament. He does allow enough through to show us a performance but he is intended, though the title character, to be one to whom things happen more than driving his own story through his strengths and weaknesses. Kubrick's gamble on our draining empathy with Redmond Barry does not pay off. If we then accept the slog of over half the film watching him scoundrelise his fortunes, knowing full well where he is headed, then it works. But we don't accept it, it's too hard to care. Even his enemies who might at least give us something to emote against, fall into their positions as narrative cogs and we just wait for the credits.

If you are unfamiliar with this film, perhaps making your way through Kubrick's ouvre, I will recommend splitting it up into hour long episodes, a kind of limited event television. This won't drive away its problems but it will serve to bright the highlights into greater focus and allow a richer experience. 

That said, later excursions into similar territory like Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract and Milos Forman's Amadeus are very much the beneficiaries of Barry Lyndon's splendour and Kubrick's determination toward authenticity. The film is also illserved by its place between the incendiary A Clockwork Orange and the solidly creepy The Shining (at least the shorter cut, the longer bores almost as badly as Barry). If you are going film by film this one might well be your last. But if you make it through, its tale of a disintegrating ethical being attaining power despite not deserving a skerrick of it, might have a more contemporary appeal.

Viewing notes: I watched Barry Lyndon in Warner's 4k steelbook package and was rewarded with sumptuous visuals and audio. As aforesaid, I split the experience into managable episodes of about an hour each. This has also been well served on Blu-Ray. Even the initial DVD is a good presentation. The expensive steelbook is the only edition available in Australia. It has both 4K and Blu-Ray copies. There are several online outlets for purchase or rent, but only SBS on Demand offers it for free (with ads).