William Makepeace Thackeray turns in his grave!

Rating: 3/10 (19 May 1999)

Kubrick so utterly fails to capture the spirit of Thackeray's picaresque novel with this vague and tiresome film that it has absolutely no business using the title Barry Lyndon. Thackeray's Barry Lyndon is a brash, swaggering, status-seeking rogue with a dynamic (but seriously faulted) personality, and an indomitable will who actively schemes, fights, and bullies his way through life. A true existentialist anti-hero. Kubrick's Barry Lyndon , played by Ryan O'Neal, couldn't be more different, even though he participates in some of the same activities as the character in the novel does. Kubrick's Lyndon has the demeanor of gentle choirboy: intensely quiet and soft-spoken with a penchant for long, earnest gazes (as is everyone in the film.) His personality is so completely vague and undefined that next to Thackeray's brilliantly extroverted protagonist, he is practically walking corpse. Thackeray's Lyndon is a man who compels our admiration (even affection) as well our contempt such is the force of his personality. Kubrick turns him into practically a non-entity who even at the end of this three hour film remains a paradoxical and annoying enigma. We learn nothing about what makes him tick because there is nothing there. I really found myself wondering if Kubrick actually read the novel - perhaps he got a synopsis from a script writer. Did they have Cliff Notes when this movie was made?! The film is steeped in an introspective, meditative atmosphere exemplified by the R. O'Neal character which is totally unsuited to the vigorous, ironic, and humorous tone of the novel. Kubrick has taken the fictional memoirs of a daring, villainous schemer and gambler and sucked all the energy and life out of them to make a tepid, pensive, piece of aesthetic boredom. The only scene that has any dramatic tension is the duel between Bullingdon and Lyndon which, ironically, is not in the novel. When adapting literature for the cinema doesn't a director have an obligation to the work's author to remain faithful to that author's artistic vision? It's understandable that some concessions must be made when moving between two such different mediums as literature and cinema; but to have such blatant disregard for the essence of the novel from which this film takes its title, Kubrick is guilty of artistic hijacking. It galls me to think that there are probably more persons living now who have seen Kubrick's bogus version of B.Lyndon than have read the novel; Kubrick, unfortunately, has had the last word because of film's cultural dominance. If a director wants to benefit from the cachet of using the title of a classic novel by an eminent author than he is obliged to remain faithful to that author's vision and not to utterly disregard it as Kubrick has done to such a wretched effect here.