Staggeringly Beautiful But Ultimately Hollow Costume Drama Of Rake's Progress Through Eighteenth-Century Nobility

Rating: 6/10 (20 July 2008)

In the eighteenth century, Redmond Barry is a young Irishman who leaves home after duelling with an English army officer, and begins a series of adventures in Europe which ultimately result in marriage to Lady Lyndon, a widowed Belgian aristocrat. However, will his new-found wealth and status bring him happiness ?
Are movies art ? This movie, perhaps more than any other, forces the viewer to answer that question. If there was an award for most gorgeous, naturally lit, exquisitely framed imagery, this must be at the top of the list. You can literally freeze it at any point and it could be a landscape by John Constable, Thomas Gainsborough, Joseph Turner or any of the great Rococo painters. For me it represents the ridiculously talented Kubrick's most complete work, but embodies both the best and the worst aspects of his style. The best because everything about it is so beautifully manicured and perfectly crafted. The worst because within the amazing attention to detail and technical brilliance it is soulless - cold, humourless, drab, boring, slow and disinterested even in its own story. It's almost like A Clockwork Orange turned inside out; whereas that film is about the passions of youth exploding out of the modern ghetto, this one is about the stuffiness of middle-age fitting into historical social convention. I sometimes think Kubrick took all the criticism of his previous film being savage, vulgar and immoral (which it isn't) and turned in the most restrained, classiest, prettiest, poshest upper-class tableau he could, simply to silence his detractors. It certainly gained acclaim, winning four Oscars (of which he got none) and influencing many - the great Ridley Scott's first feature, The Duellists, is almost a sycophantic young fan's remake, and people like Merchant-Ivory made an entire career out of replicating the look of it. In my reviews I often try and describe movies from a technical perspective, but there's no point here - everything is just perfect, that's all there is to say. There isn't a single frame that could be improved upon. The problem is the plot and the characters. Neither the events of William Makepeace Thackeray's 1844 novel, nor the general tenets of the bewigged costume drama interest me in the slightest. I don't care about Barry, the other characters (especially Lady Lyndon) are ciphers, and the drama - the love affair with Nora, the sudden confession to the Chevalier, the death of the child, Barry's self-sacrifice in the duel with Bullingdon - have no fizz, no pep, they just lay there and wash over you. The acting is faultless in the sense that everything is determined by the style, and the cast is great, including several of Kubrick's stock troupe (Berkoff, Quigley, Rossiter, Sharp, Stone) and Vitali, who went on to become one of his most important assistants. However, I simply can't watch the film as straight drama - it's turgid beyond belief. I love it though, so every time I see it I simply ignore the plot and bathe in John Alcott's astonishing photography. Each one of those long, slow, pullbacks is just astonishing to me, as is the fact that all the candlelit interiors were shot with just natural light, employing the most massive lenses ever used outside of serious astronomy. This, combined with the gorgeous music (notably Handel's unforgettable five-note Sarabande in D-minor for harpsichord), result in an incredible sensory overload to be treasured. I just don't believe it's a complete movie experience. Around the same time that Kubrick made this, another director I like, Larry Cohen, made a movie called God Told Me To. That movie is a piece of trash - it looks rubbish, it was shot hastily and cheaply, Cohen probably edited it in his sleep and it was shoved out into theatres without any thought. It lacks everything Kubrick's film has. But it's a better movie. It's a better movie because the script has more interesting ideas every three minutes than Barry Lyndon does in three hours. Every character is unique and fascinating, the plot is gripping, crazy, exciting, suspenseful, original and clever. It makes you feel alive to watch it, which the Kubrick film does not. I started by asking if movies are Art and they are; Barry Lyndon is proof positive. But they are not Classical Art, they are something else (which is often why highfalutin critics look down their noses at them). Kubrick's standards were the highest of any filmmaker and his movies cannot be missed, but in some ways they are also great folly, odes to a style paragon that doesn't encapsulate what cinema is really about. Don't miss this great film, but see the rest of this remarkable director's work too.