Word: thackerays
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...today, which I haven't read but which he assures me is penetrating and uplifting. Most of them (the reviews) seem to deflect off Barry Lyndon like poorly aimed arrows. Kubrick evokes 18th century Europe with a historians' eye for detail in his cinematographic version of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel. He succeeds in transporting the viewer to the aristocratic world of the 1760s and stuns us with his well-designed shots of landscapes. But Dinah, the acting! Ryan O'Neal proves three things: first, only one O'Neal can act and her name starts with a T; second, looking...
SECOND PARADOX: As he did in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick relies not on words -he is as sparing of them as Thackeray is profligate-but images to tell his story. Yet Barry Lyndon lacks the experimental, hallucinatory visual quality that made 2001 a cultural touchstone of the tripped-out '60s. Kubrick has shot and edited Barry Lyndon with the classic economy and elegance associated with the best works of the silent cinema. The frantic trompe 1'oeil manner -all quick cuts and crazy angles-recently favored by ambitious film makers (and audiences) has been rigorously rejected...
Kubrick does not know what drew him to this tale of a scoundrel's rise and fall. Beyond noting that he has always enjoyed Thackeray, he does not try to explain his choice: "It's like trying to say why you fell in love with your wife-it's meaningless...
...novel, Thackeray used a torrent of words to demonstrate Barry's lack of self-knowledge. Narrating his own story, Barry so obviously exaggerates his claims to exemplary behavior that the reader perceives he is essentially a braggart and poltroon. Daringly, Kubrick uses silence to make the same point. "People like Barry are successful because they are not obvious-they don't announce themselves," says Kubrick. So it is mainly by the look in Ryan O'Neal's eyes-a sharp glint when he spies the main chance, a gaze of hurt befuddlement when things go awry...
...surely the most gripping duel ever filmed, is full of angry uncontrolled passion. Barry's innocent infatuation with his own child, "the hope of his family, the pride of his manhood," has a touching, redeeming warmth to it. His downfall, much more dramatically rendered by Kubrick than by Thackeray, has a tragic starkness and a moral correctness. In short, Kubrick has accomplished what amounts to a minor miracle-an uncompromised artistic vision that also puts all of Warner Bros, money "on the screen," as Kubrick says, borrowing an old trade term. He feels he has done right by himself...