I felt very privileged to see a new print of BARRY LYNDON last night, as part of the BFI's ongoing Stanley Kubrick season. Whether it is Kubrick's 'masterpiece' (as they claim) is debatable, but it is a beautiful, even stately, film.
I first saw it a few years ago on television, and even on the small screen, its painterly photography recalling Hogarth and Reynolds and the stirring repeated musical cycles of Handal and Schubert really made an impression. More than Ken Adam's production design and John Alcott's cinematography (with interiors lit by candles only, giving the screen a softened, burnished look), it is the slow burning emotional impetus that lifts it (like all of Kubrick's best films, especially 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY) onto a higher, almost ineffable plain.
BARRY LYNDON is an adaptation of William Thackeray's novel charting the progress of Redmond Barry (played by a superb Ryan O'Neal) from modest commoner in Ireland to refined gentleman Barry Lyndon at the top table of European aristocracy. His place there is attained through ambition, misconduct and chance, but predominantly channelled and checked by the vicissitudes of fate. Lyndon's rise is light in tone and full of adventure - benefitting from a particularly dry narration by Michael Hordern - and he bears the burden of his downfall stoically as the second half of the film turns to tragedy, and reaches icy peaks of desolation.
The film's power is in its subtleties and how it forbids any strict moral conclusions to be drawn. Barry Lyndon is at once a 'common opportunist' as his stepson Lord Bullingdon (a brilliantly snivelling Leon Vitali) would have it, and a man of quiet fortitude and resilience. Kubrick manages to reach a deeper truth of humanity not by meticulously replicating Eighteenth century life as we understand it but by acknowledging that all we have are representations of the period, a sense of Eighteen Century-ness.
And the lesson that a fortune won with speed and tenacity is often lost as vigorously still casts a shadow over our own times.
