Hot Garbage

Rating: 1/10 (22 February 2011)

I love Stanley Kubrick. "2001" and "Dr. Strangelove" are two of my all-time favorite films. I also love "Clockwork Orange," "Full Metal Jacket," and "Paths Of Glory." So you can see why I was shocked and disappointed when I finally got around to seeing the stultifying "Barry Lyndon," a film so dull and pointless that you'll wonder why he bothered.
I'll start with the one positive: the cinematography. The movie is beautifully photographed... every frame is rich, lush, and looks like the box cover of a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. That might be enough to salvage a film if the story was told visually, but "Barry Lyndon" is a movie with little or no narrative. Ryan O'Neal- passive and blank- floats through the picture like Forrest Gump or Benjamin Button: the lights are on but nobody's home. We get no sense of any inner life or personality, and the small amount of character we do glimpse reveals Barry to be a spoiled, selfish coward, and one hardly worthy of such a massively-scaled motion picture.
The story follows Barry as he falls in love with his cousin, deserts the Army, lies about his bravery, marries a wealthy widow, cheats on her while squandering her fortune and abuses his stepson. He is an awful, unpleasant person, and Kubrick never seems to figure out WHY we're following the man's life in the first place. Glaring gaps in the plot are filled in by a narrator, who advances the story more in three lines than we get in half an hour of wordless drudgery.
Yes, the candlelight scenes are beautiful. Use of the special NASA lens was obviously part of Kubrick's reward for filming the faked moon landings, but this is not a device on which an entire film can rest. It astounds me that there are so few people willing to stand up and say the emperor isn't wearing any clothes. It seems to me that most people declare this movie profound because they feel they're supposed to, because if something looks and sounds like a classic, a masterpiece, then it surely must be... right?
Wrong. "Barry Lyndon" is a dull, plodding, pretentious period piece without any saving graces. Composition of frame and brilliant lighting do not make up for a poor actor playing an unengaging character in a movie that does its best to kill any sense of drama, suspense, humor, and action. This feels almost like a deliberate statement by the great Kubrick to make a movie WITHOUT significance... this is an empty exercise in period photography, and little else. "None of the grandeur of "2001," he seems to say, "none of the shocking violence of "Clockwork Orange..." Just three solid hours of powdered wigs and blank faces. Any reviewer who says otherwise is a pseudo-intellectual pandering to the ghost of a legend. Don't waste your time.
GRADE: D-