Word: kubrick
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This time, though, this tried-and-true approach doesn't work. You can't--even if you're Kubrick--tell a three-hour tale of adventure and a struggle to regain an inheritance without characterization. And you can't make a picaresque film with next to no action. Very little happens in Barry Lyndon. Kubrick's success in 2001 seems to have convinced him that playing the camera lovingly over a tableaux while playing highbrow music on the soundtrack is a substitute for thought and action. Kubrick's sets are at first startling--the lush green beauty of Irish hills...
...FIRST AND WORST is Ryan O'Neal himself. Kubrick has never made so gross or so unnecessary a casting error. There are plenty of handsome actors around, and almost any of them could have been less of a gobbler in this part. While everyone else is speaking in Irish brogue or the King's English, O'Neal sounds like a smooth-voiced Jack Nicholson out of Doonesbury. "How could you do this to me, Nora?" he asks in a deadpan American voice that could have come straight out of Gidget Goes Loco. O'Neal's Barry has no charm...
...same trouble--a confusion of the profound with the merely unintelligible--mars Marisa Berenson's Countess of Lyndon. Perhaps Kubrick wanted her to look like those enigmatic Tuscan profiles her great uncle used to sell to Boston brahmins. She falls in love with Barry, marries him, remains statuesque but apathetic, and finally becomes religious. She is weak, and as such the audience tends to sympathize with her. But it is unclear whether Barry treats her rightly or wrongly. We see nothing of their courtship. We see little of their relations in marriage. We just don't know...
...worse. The fairy tale atmosphere of the first part dissolves into a full-fledged Victorian novel of materialism--a family struggle over inheritance, Barry's mother's desire for her son to get a peerage, the social ostracism that Barry faces after an outburst of physical violence. Kubrick's elegant touch is not entirely lost, but it is squandered and irreversibly diluted. At last a strange plot line emerges. The Countess of Lyndon's son by her first husband, Bullingdon, conceives a hatred for his stepfather that is largely justified by Barry's behavior. Barry becomes the doting father...
...hard to say what we are supposed to feel when he is successful and the movie ends at last. The narrator had more or less given away the conclusion an hour before, and dissipated most of the suspense. The Countess remains morose, so perhaps we should be unhappy too. Kubrick insists in the dialogue of the last scenes that Barry's crime had been the wanton and irresponsible destruction of a "fine family fortune"--a crime that would undoubtedly have seemed more heinous to Thackeray and his readers than it does to us and, presumably, to Kubrick. Maybe...