Barry Lyndon has always been dismissed within Kubrick’s filmography. While he is a filmmaker known for his versatility across genres, Barry Lyndon still sits uneasily within Kubrick’s wider body of work. It doesn’t have the satirical bite of Dr Strangelove. It’s not groundbreaking like 2001. There is no rousing hero like Spartacus. It’s not visceral and shocking to the point of censorship like A Clockwork Orange.
Instead, it’s an austere and remarkably restrained examination of blue-blooded society, based on a Thackeray novel: a classic tale of an idealistic social climber in eighteenth-century Ireland, eventually brutalised by his own successes.
It’s been discarded by many as a “coffee-table movie” (Pauline Kael). Others describe it as an overly-traditional stepping stone in Kubrick’s career which is dull, uninspired, and ultimately eclipsed by his next and much greater film, The Shining. It seems almost universal among the film world that Barry Lyndon is so ordinary of a creation to the point where it simply doesn’t warrant much attention in comparison.
Yet, in the conventionality of its subject lies the film’s genius. Barry Lyndon doesn’t make the same kinds of explosive statements which warranted mass censorship campaigns surrounding Kubrick’s other films. Instead, it’s the most subtle peeling back of the glacial veneer which enshrouds the aristocratic society of the past, covering its unpalatable darkness – the most cold, detached way to use the camera in order to examine the violent and uncompromising world which young hero Barry enters into.
The whole film looks like one, long, eighteenth-century oil painting. In perhaps the most overt example of Kubrick’s meticulous use of mise-en-scene, entire tableaus are constructed in symmetry and uncompromising detail, silent and still. To get the lighting right, whole scenes were filmed in candlelight alone and new lenses were made by NASA for Kubrick’s camera. Cool, detached, and beautiful – the cinematography deliberately evokes classic beauty, straight from the work of Vermeer or Watteau.
These choices have not helped Barry Lyndon’s reputation in Kubrick’s filmography as an overly-conventional film. Perhaps a different filmmaker would have pressed further into the visceral undertones behind class progression at this time. Others would have found the grittiness of the war and duelling culture that Barry is repeatedly exposed to as a spectacular visual subject – and made a film with the silhouettes, saturation, and cinematographic darkness of a film like Apocalypse Now. Yet, Kubrick not only picks a conventional story, but also a conventional way of visually representing it.
Yet, peeling back this detached visual layer ever so slightly reveals the darkness that the audience knows Kubrick can represent. There are only small moments where the artifice breaks. It comes in Act II of the film, when Barry lashes out at his step-son, beating him in front of his guests. Kubrick follows the screams of the surrounding women; the boy pushed to the floor by his hair; every punch that Barry lands upon his smaller teenage son. The guests form a gladiatorial circle around the scene – beauty, for a moment, is replaced by animalistic venom.
The scene lasts 40 seconds. It is still enough to break through hours of visual spectacle.
That’s why Barry Lyndon is ultimately so worth seeing. It breaks convention by using the artifice of supposed conventionality. Underneath Kubrick’s opulent tableaus lies the worst of human darkness – the primalism which makes us beat our children in front of an audience. Humanity at its most uncompromising, placed behind a mask of social allure. He lets this mask slip just enough for it to be perceptible. Blink and you’ll miss it.
Yet, this break from visual convention tells the audience all it needs to know about the sort of society that Barry inhabits, and what he is trying to break into.
