A damn fine period piece, carried by a charismatic Ryan O' Neal

Rating: 10/10 (24 July 2007)

Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray is, reportedly, the first novel in the English language to feature an anti-hero. Stanley Kubrick's film version retains that aspect to perfection, thus becoming a slightly different period drama from what we are used to.
The main character is an Irishman named Redmond Barry (Ryan O' Neal), a con artist who, after killing a rival in a duel, starts traveling around Europe looking for wealth and power. With his charm and ability with words he manages to eventually rise to the upper classes by marrying the recently widowed Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson), even though said marriage is far from happy, due to Barry's most annoying talent, that of bringing misery and ruin wherever he goes.
Given his perfectionistic reputation, the words "Kubrick" and "period piece" must have sounded like a magical combination, and indeed it is: the Clockwork Orange director handles every technical aspect of the film with absolute professionalism, from the candle-lit cinematography to the astonishing costumes to the marvelous production design (all of which were given Academy Awards), ensuring one element everyone remembers about this kind of film (the visual seductiveness) is pitch-perfect.
The other classic ingredient in costume dramas is a touching love story, but that is not something Kubrick would have told, fond as he was of tales of solitude, unhappiness and destruction. The first is a characteristic of Barry, the other two are what he has a habit of causing: as noble as his intentions may be (and they rarely are) and no matter how close he gets to the right people, he is doomed to remain alone, his own wife being unable to accept his opportunistic schemes. Nevertheless, there is a kind of smugness (in a good way) to him that makes him less unlikable than expected, and O' Neal's charismatic performance (complete with decent accent) keeps the character away from anything resembling a one-dimensional caricature of the average con-man, providing a lightness of touch which saves the film from becoming too bleak during its long running time (almost three hours).
Last, but not least, Barry Lyndon would not be half as good without the classical music used as soundtrack, each melancholic tone proving a perfect companion to the humorous but fundamentally sad tale of (lost) love, power and abandon.
A must-see for fans of period pieces, Lyndon is also unusual by Kubrick's standards, its lighter tone being a neat counterbalance to the darker subjects the director explored in Paths of Glory, The Killing and A Clockwork Orange. Yes, it is very long. Yes, it requires multiple viewings to be fully understood, just like every other Kubrick movie. But it is also, like all of the notorious perfectionist's pictures, infinitely rewarding and considerably less unsettling than his more famous works.