An Uppity Irishman.

Rating: Null/10 (28 August 2011)

The whole story of an 18th-century Irish kid working his way up and down through the world is staged by director Kubrick as a series of tableaux vivants. Tableaux were popular before movies, radio, and television, and before the introduction of posters of famous paintings or historical events. The participants in period dress would simple assume artistic poses, stand there properly lighted, and do nothing. They wouldn't speak or move.
And that's pretty much a typical scene from "Barry Lyndon." Scene follows scene, in which several people in lavish dress stand in dramatic light and nobody's moving. It must have been deliberate and, to a certain extent it works. Let me put it this way. There is, say, a scene in which a game of cards is being played by half a dozen people sitting around a table. Everyone is as frozen as an ice sculpture. Then one person's eyes -- not the head, just the eyes -- look up from the cards. The eyes, let's say, belong to Marisa Berenson in an outlandish period costume. The gaze lights on the pose plastique figure of, say, Ryan O'Neal who is seated opposite Berenson, staring back at her. Well, the movement is minimal but it tells us all we need to know. There's a card game going on and O'Neill and Berenson fall for each other.
Or rather SEEM to fall for each other because, in the case of Redmond Barry, O'Neal's character, he's not truly interested in Marisa Berenson's mind or her body -- just her title and her money. I think anyone would have to admit that this shows a certain shallowness on O'Neal's part because this is Marisa Berenson we're talking about. She's sinewy, has the eyes of a lemur, and is about ten feet tall. She can join that girl's basketball team along with Mariel Hemingway and Uma Thurman. If there were any depth to O'Neal's character, he would disregard her title and her money and her mind, too, and just be interested in her body. People with featherbrained values like Redmond Barry are disgusting.
Anyway, though he began as a penurious nobody in the Auld Sod, he becomes Barry Lyndon, possessor of a fortune, a vast estate, Marisa Berenson, and a stepson who hates him because he sees O'Neal as the mountebank he actually is, a phony through and through.
Not satisfied with a loving wife, a mansion and an estate the size of Crete, he overreaches when he tries to bribe his way into the peerage and before you know it the Lyndon family is on the verge of bankruptcy. Everyone is poor -- the family, the dozens of butlers and attendants, the coachmen, the livery men, the men who mow the lawn, the resident preacher, the live-in technician who maintains the computers.
That feckless ambition and a mutual hatred between him and his stepson get him into a lot of trouble. He loses a leg, gets kicked out of the house with a small annuity, and disappears from the story -- back to Ireland, with occasional visits to the continent where he gambles and loses often.
It's a pretty melancholy story, a sequence of achievements followed by loss. There's practically no humor. There's not much passion either. (The only real passion I can remember from a Kubrick movie is when the soldiers join the German girl in singing a simple tune in "Paths of Glory.") There's an abrupt fist fight, two battle scenes, and a couple of duels but nobody talks much about their emotions. Emotions like love are conveyed with a glance or by someone's hand slowly grasping another's. Anger is shown with a frown. If someone is afraid, he blinks or gulps.
But what a phenomenal feast for the eyes the film is. All these tableaux and blinks are done in settings that nobody has ever seen in a theater before -- vast halls, real candle light, sumptuous dinners, and make up that turns rich men into poufs. When O'Neal first kisses Berenson, I was worried that HIS lipstick might be smeared.
Not all that much acting is required, and that may be all to the good. Ryan O'Neal, his name notwithstanding, seems unable to get hold of a decent Irish accent. (You and I could do as well.) And -- I can't tell whether he's handsome or not but I've never been impressed by his acting ability. He does okay when he's not speaking. The two little kids are great. Berenson doesn't have to say a word. Andre Morell's subtlety makes his small role a stand out.
I've often wondered how novelists like Thackeray and the rest could turn out such long books with nothing more than a pen and a pot of ink. It would take half a lifetime just to copy them with the same instruments.