In advance of our repeat screening of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, committee member Russ Kale shares his thoughts on the film’s reputation, and how it compared with the enthusiastic WFS screening in February.
Like Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles before him, Stanley Kubrick has developed a reputation as a director who is difficult to enjoy – so lionised by the history of cinema that watching anything he’s made starts to feel a bit like homework. Even his broadest comedy, Dr. Strangelove (1964), has had most of its pleasure leached out of it by successive generations of film scholars avidly discussing it as high art, repeating the same stories about Kubrick’s perfectionism over and over until the film basically ceases to matter – it becomes, in this form, just an object one can point to and declare genius.
Our February screening wasn’t the first time I’ve seen Barry Lyndon, according to my notebooks. That said, I think that my first viewing must have been a hazy post-midnight watch a decade ago, because I have barely any recollection of it. What I certainly didn’t remember from that first viewing was the scope of Kubrick’s vision here – how lush the sets and locations and costumes are – or just how much story and how many events Kubrick has crammed into the three-hour runtime. Nor did I remember how witty and engaging the film actually is.
What Kubrick has succeeded in is bringing the fullness of Thackeray’s picaresque novel to the screen and giving it the true feeling of being a serial. One element that really adds to this is the perfect casting of even the smallest roles. All the minor characters who appear, from the highwayman’s teenaged son to the soldier that Barry bests in a boxing match to Captain Potzdorf’s governmental uncle, are all given performances of such precision and vividness that they feel like entire chapters of Barry’s life, even though they spend mere seconds on screen. However, the decision to remove the first-person narration that’s in Thackeray’s novel means that most of this film comes to us without Barry’s own insights. This might have led to the popular perception that Barry Lyndon is distant and cold.
When watching the film, though, it seems clear that this perception is unwarranted. Kubrick paints the first two thirds of the film with streaks of broad comedy, the effects of which linger long afterwards. Barry’s awkward courtship with his cousin, the ruse by which he and the Chevalier de Balibari (Patrick Magee) escape Prussia, and even the duels Barry fights on the Chevalier’s behalf are all raucous moments of comedy. Even in the duel against Lord Bullingdon, there are beats of humour to leaven the gloom that hangs over everything. The film may ultimately be scathingly critical of its protagonist, but it does so while looking at a world full of witty and absurd characters.
Another element that has contributed to the film’s chilly reputation is its visual style. Kubrick was partly inspired by the paintings of William Hogarth, and in one of the film’s most famous images, Barry is shown in an almost identical pose to Hogarth’s ‘Marriage A-la-mode 2’ (a painting which could basically sum up the entire second half of the film). What this means, on a practical level, is a large number of carefully-constructed tableaux, expressive lighting techniques, and landscapes in which the power of the elements overwhelms the human figures. The cinematography was the work of the Academy Award-winning John Alcott, who also worked with Kubrick on 2001 and A Clockwork Orange, and it is in every respect remarkable: stately and dramatic when it needs to be, caring and intimate at other times, but never obtrusive when the performances need to carry all the weight of a scene. I’m not completely sure where this style’s association with ‘coldness’ comes from, but I imagine it’s probably been reinforced by Kubrick’s reputation as a perfectionist. A reputation like this is almost never factually accurate, and stories tend to get blown out of proportion. Kubrick and Alcott shot many of these scenes without electric lighting, and famously borrowed three large and expensive lenses left over from the Apollo missions which enabled them to shoot some indoor scenes by candlelight. However, this fact has been blown out of proportion, and it’s now commonly said that the production used no electric lighting at all – a story that’s completely implausible if you look at any of the exterior nighttime scenes. Even the artificial lighting, however, successfully mimics the natural lighting to such a degree that it feels like it was filmed on location in time as well as place.
Because Kubrick’s previous films were heavily based in more popular genres, and because they all shared a more acidic and satirical edge, many audiences were unsure what to make of Barry Lyndon, and the film was a disappointment at the box office. The contemporary press was equally dismissive – multiple critics, including Charles Champlin and Pauline Kael, referred to it being less of a film and more of a coffee-table book, with Kael adding that Kubrick had “drained the blood” out of the source material. Even Vincent Canby, in an otherwise positive review, described the film as “another fascinating challenge”. Although making a slow and stately film is entirely appropriate to what Kubrick clearly wanted to say about Thackeray’s novel, it seems like this was the wrong type of surprise to viewers who wanted another breaking of their expected boundaries. In any event, this critical disappointment had an apparent impact on Kubrick. It definitely factored into his decision to make a slightly more traditional genre piece next… The Shining (1980).