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-- .. - - ~- - ...., _~ !_---:;n - - Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson) at spa with Barry Lyndon (Ryan O'Neal), whose five years in the army, and some considerable experience of the world had by now dispelled any of those romantic notions regarding love, and who now began to have it in mind to marry a woman of fortune and condition in this scene from Stanley Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon," starring O'Neal and Miss Berenson, written for the screen, produced and directed by Kubrick, based on the novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. Patrick Magee and Hardy Kruger also star in the Warner Bros. release. QUICKIES BARRY LYNDON Screenplay and direction: Stanley Kubrick, after the novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. Cinematography: John Alcott. Production design: Ken Adam. Editing: Tony Lawson. Music: Irish traditional music plus works by Bach, Frederick the Great, Handel, Mozart, Paisiello, Schubert and Vivaldi, arranged by Leonard Rosenman. Production: Kubrick. The players: Ryan O'Neal and) in order of appearance, Gay Hamilton, Marie Kean, Leonard Rossiter, Godfrey Quigley, Diana Koerner, Hardy Kruger, Patrick Magee, Marisa Berenson, Leon Vitali( Steven Berkoff; Michael Hordern narrator). 30 ( 1.) Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon is a film in which the expected always happens-but usually in quite an unexpected way, much as a detail in a painting will surprise and delight, regardless of the ordinariness of its context. The world of Barry Lyndon, first of all, is not the 18th-Century Europe of historical reality; it is the 18th-Century Europe of Art-of the literature, painting, music, sculpture, architecture, costume, and design of the period. That's as it should be for a film from a picaresque novel about a rudely-reared, would-be gentleman's striving after the elegance befitting what he feels to be his rightful station. And it's as it should be for Kubrick, whose preference for the realm of art and ideas over that of natural, historical, quotidian reality is evident, and whose cinematic studies of Manipulated Man, even at their rawest, have always been couched in idealistic terms: tidy sets, tidy costumes, tidy makeup, and tight, impeccably composed shots, I've never seen quite so many absolutely symmetrical framecompositions in such a short time as during the running of Barry Lyndon; and no form-for-form's-sake, either
-the symmetry of individual shots and of montage directly reflects the symmetry of the story of Barry Lyndon's rise and fall. As good big films should be, Barry Lyndon is a world unto itself: fascinating and precise, with room for taste, elegance, suspense, action, humor, compassion, and insight. Most of all, it is a film of-and about-beauty. As beauty has a certain timelessness about it, so, too, do Kubrick's shots :..in Barry Lyndon. Indeed, the film is remarkably consistent with the style and atmosphere of a picaresque novel: Within a shot, as within a well-wrought literary sentence, time stands still, or is even stretched. But between shots, as between sentences, minutes or years may flash by. Kubrick has structured Barry Lyndon in classic narrative style, to the point that the space between sequences, bridged by Michael Hordern's smooth narration, fairly invites one to imagine a title: "Chapter the Fourth, In Which Our Hero ... " Because of the unusual duration of many of the shots, camera movement is slow and intermittent, tending to correct and adjust a still point of view rather than take us into the action of the film and its characters. Tracking shots are so infrequent that when they do occur, we are almost physically startled. But we always remain outside, and the film, even when it meets us on the most agreeable and inviting terms, does so only within the context of reaffirming that basic outsideness. My favorite example of Kubrick's alternation, in Barry Lyndon, of fluid with frozen time and of fulfilled anticipation with subverted expectation is the sequence in which Barry first approaches Lady Lyndon. Kubrick crosscuts as they eye each other across a gaming-table, curious, tentative, under the watchful eye of her chaplain. At last she tells the chaplain she is going out for air, rises, and leaves the scene. We've seen this a hundred times before: Barry and the chaplain will exchange glances, and Barry will get up and follow the lady out. But the chaplain does not look-significantly, suspiciously, or at all-at Barry. And Barry himself just sits there. Finally Kubrick cuts away from the shot altogether, to a profile of Lady Lyndon ou tside the palace, still as a statue in the blue of the evening. Though we didn't see him get up to follow her outside, our faith that Barry will join her remains unshaken; so we wait. And Lady Lyndon waits. But she faces confidently away from the palace, while we eagerly seek the space behind her, at screen left, for some sign of our hero's approach. We pick up a pair of French doors and watch them. We've seen this before: he'll come out of the background as she stays motionless before us. But time and the lady continue to stand still. Finally we see-or do I only imagine?-a figure pass by one set of French doors, headed toward the other. Now we're ready. We lick our lips. And Kubrick cuts away again, abruptly presents us with a close shot of Barry already entering the frame-from screen-left, as we expected, but much closer to us and the lady than he could possibly have got during the time since that form passed the doors. Our expectation demands that Barry be there, and Kubrick's awareness of that anticipation puts Barry there. But how he does it-ah! that's what makes Barry Lyndon so eminently worth watching. Robert C. Cumbow (2.) The question is, did Charlie Chaplin set out to create a masterpiece when he conceived City Lights? Did Renoir say to himself back in 1938, "I'm going to create a masterpiece and call it The Rules of the Game?" This question becomes relevant in discussing Barry Lyndon because more than anything, Kubrick's film looks like a "masterpiece" created by someone intent on creating a "masterpiece". "Kubrick's Grandest Gamble," proclaims Time. A gamble, yes. Anyone in the mid-1970s who believes he can gross better than $30 million on an adaptation of a minor Thackeray novel is, if nothing else, a gambler. But has Kubrick produced a great film? His masterpiece? Let me admit that three hours of Barry Lyndon left me overwhelmed by the expansive power and beauty of Kubrick's creation. The cinematography, the settings, the whole evocation of the 18th Century possess an unbelievable richness; the film must have been a nightmare of logistics. There is little doubt that Barry Lyndon is an intelligent film by an important film artist. But. .. Something's missing here. I was not moved by Barry's loss of his only son. Ryan O'Neal didn't make me feel it, Kubrick didn't make me feel it-because Kubrick is too emotionally detached from his characters to feel this central tragedy of Barry Lyndon himself. We get no sense that Kubrick cares for, identifies with, or even has simple compassion for any of his characters. Only when the performers themselves amplify their roles-as Patrick Magee (the Chevalier) does, but O'Neal fails to do-is any feeling imparted to the viewer. John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King, in many ways a lesser film, never fails to inform the audience that however foolish the characters played by Caine and Connery are, deep down, Huston really loves the sons-of-bitches. Even Bufiuel, the darkest of satirists, finds a certain discreet charm in his characters. Kubrick does not. When was the last film in which Kubrick had any genuine feeling for any of his characters? In this context, 2001 is and will continue to be his masterpiece: Kubrick moving the universe without ever touching the human spirit. We care more for HAL than for Lockwood or Dullea; HAL reduced to singing "Daisy" us far more moving than Lockwood's abandonment in space. Barry Lyndon has been termed Kubrick's Lola Montes and this is a valid and useful comparison. Kubrick's control of camera, his unerring perfection approaches Ophuls', though I prefer Ophuls' vertiginous tracking movements to Kubrick's more static compositions. But Kubrick will never possess Ophuls' joyous sensuality, the spirit with which he celebrates life while baring its follies. Following Redmond Barry's travels across the absurd social and political landscape of 18th-Century Europe, one wonders why Kubrick chose this work. If it tells us that men are vain, greedy, and uncaring, that history is little more than the narrative of man's warring and petty struggles for power, then so what? There is no feeling that any real people are caught up in this tragedy. Barry, after all, only gets what he deserves. I guess I like my masterpieces more ragged-the raw, disjointed emo- 31
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