Word: kubrick
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...story of Barry Lyndon. The reviewers will tell you O'Neal is a rogueish Lyndon. He seemed to me to be the type of guy who gets hit by the Second Avenue Subway while trying to rape a Tactical Force policeman in drag. Kubrick also ignores a potentially exciting view of the 1760s--the Hogarthian underside of English society. All told, the carefully composed landscapes and Kubrick's use of a new German lens to film in candlelight just save this film from being potboiler par excellance. That Kubrick's visuals can overcome such poor acting is a credit...
ONLY STANLEY KUBRICK could have done it--made a film more beautiful, more boring and more expensive than The Great Gatsby. Barry Lyndon is a bad film, a disaster of epic proportions, though its stately pace and self-effacing irony gloss over the worst. There are parts of it that are so bad that an entirely ironic response takes over: "This scene, unbelievably awful though it is, was created and directed by Stanley Kubrick; it must be bad for a good reason." But there is no method to Barry Lyndon's badness, only a few misguided impulses which tear...
Part of the film wants to be a fairy tale, part a travelogue, part a Victorian novel, part an accurate reconstruction of eighteenth-century life. At least Kubrick can't be accused of what many critics are now attacking Costa-Gavras for, being a director condemned--as a bad director might have been in Dante's Inferno--to making the same film over and over again. Barry Lyndon is as unlike anything Kubrick has ever done as it is below the level of anything Kubrick has ever done...
...though, it is similar--like every Kubrick film since Lolita, Barry Lyndon is adapted from a book. Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, like his far greater creation, Becky Sharp, is a social climber at heart. Thackeray's attitude to figures of this kind is a mixture of sympathy and a consciousness that they must not be allowed to succeed. Thus Barry ends his life as a poor invalid in Ireland and Becky as a tattered card sharp making the rounds of tawdry German courts. Yet some sympathy always remains for these characters, either because--like Becky--they are so much brighter...
...successful things Kubrick to preserve some of this ambiguity of sentiment. On the whole, though, Kubrick does not encourage any kind of emotional response, and he certainly doesn't give us enough accurate material to go on. The characters are like the puppets Thackeray describes in the prologue of Vanity Fair--neither rounded human figures nor Dickensian caricatures. Kubrick rarely creates human characters--Dr. Strangelove was a gallery of types, Lolita a collection of perverts, 2001 veered from the banal to the superhuman, and A Clockwork Orange was about the warping of humanity...