Stanley Kubrick’s rereleased Barry Lyndon, based on Thackeray’s 1844 novel about a roguish adventurer, is more than 40 years old. What is so striking now isn’t Ken Adam’s sumptuous production design, with those painterly candlelit interiors. It’s the eerie, hypnotic adagio of the pace – a Kubrick signature, very different from, say, the rollicking world of Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963).
Taking the 18th-century tale at a steady, relentless drumbeat, and with a seductively cool detachment, Kubrick guides you through his hero’s rise and fall, bookended by two sensational duelling scenes. He brings about a slow, mysterious shift from comedy to tragedy; a tidal advance and retreat in fortune.
Ryan O’Neal is Barry, an Irish boy forced to enlist in the British army and then, after his attempted desertion, press-ganged into the Prussian infantry, from which he emerges to become a gambler in the company of fraudulent nobleman Chevalier de Balibari (Patrick Magee), and finally marry the beautiful, wealthy widow Lady Lyndon, played by Marisa Berenson (who is now, incidentally, Lady Capulet on the London West End stage in Kenneth Branagh’s Romeo and Juliet). Barry is encouraged to overreach himself by his steely mother (Marie Kean) and quarrels with his stepson (Leon Vitali), a spoilt, rich young fellow with a resonant title: Lord Bullingdon.
O’Neal might have seemed like pretty-boy casting at the time, but now he looks perfect: weak, venal, passive, with a gorgeous face successively marred by rage and entitlement and pain. It is customary to giggle at the appearance of Leonard Rossiter in Kubrick’s films, but he provides a fine cameo here as the grumpy Captain Quin, and deserves to be remembered for more than his TV comedy, excellent as that was.
For me, this movie’s unsung hero is Michael Hordern, the off-camera narrator providing a perfect quiver of sadness and irony: he is virtually a double-act with the often tongue-tied Barry, watching sadly over his adventures; an absent father figure.
Barry Lyndon is an intimate epic of utter lucidity and command. The final intertitle drily noting that all the characters are “equal now” in death is exquisitely judged.
