The Napoleon of Film Meets His Waterloo

Rating: Null/10 (13 January 2004)

Stanley Kubrick lost it all with BARRY LYNDON. Before this film, he was coming off ten years of magnificent screen classics: SPARTACUS, DR. STRANGELOVE, 2001 SPACE ODYSSEY, and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. No other director has ever created four masterpieces in a row. Yet after this film, he was never the same again. What went wrong?
From the very beginning of his career, Kubrick was a film maker who gambled, creating stories around ugly, stupid, or hateful characters. From the paranoid, bomb-crazy generals of DR. STRANGELOVE, to the lifeless, sleepwalking astronauts of 2001, to the brutal teenage bullies of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Kubrick had always insisted on putting the worst elements of mankind on screen and forcing audiences to cheer them on to a brutal, squalid ending. Why didn't the Kubrick attack pattern work again for BARRY LYNDON?
Kubrick miscalculated by placing his new monster in a tranquil setting, where his personal ugliness seemed hurtful instead of liberating. Where Alex joyously splashes the blood of his victims on the sterile white walls of a barren future, Barry Lyndon rampages through a green and lush (and highly sentimentalized) British past where his personal rage is inexplicable. That is to say, it is inexplicable in visual terms. The plot clumsily piles up reasons for Barry to hate the world -- betrayed by his family, by the army, by society at large -- but the betrayals don't stick because Kubrick has fallen prey to the impulse to prettify every scene and frame. One look at the sterile interior of the Korova Milkbar explains the murderous rage of Alex and his droogs, whereas four hours of picture postcard views of Olde England make Barry Lyndon's behavior seem arbitrary and unearned.

Another issue is the problem of punishment. Alex of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE is a hateful character, but he is knocked out of action fairly early.
Indeed for the last two thirds of the film he is the victim, putting the audience in his corner for a last minute resurrection that has the force of a darkly ironic yet undeniably stimulating triumph of the human spirit. Barry Lyndon, on the other hand, grows ever more spiteful and cruel as his wealth and prestige increase, thus making it almost impossible to like him or sympathize with his behavior. When he is crippled and broken at the end of the film, there is no ironic victory for the human spirit, and no sense of justice being served, merely a squalid end to a pointless tale of human degradation -- in impossibly lush surroundings that seem entirely unrelated to the inner lives of the characters.
Kubrick lost it all with BARRY LYNDON, and yet even in defeat it's impossible not to admire his imagination, courage, and daring, offering time and time again to challenge society's self-deceiving hangups and stale pieties.