Barry Lyndon

The only good period piece

There are many great scenes in Barry Lyndon, but for some reason the one I remember most from when I watched it the first time is a card game about halfway through the film. Before a small crowd of guests, an incredibly decadent aristocrat loses some tremendous amount of money to the hero Barry (Barry is cheating) and then, as obviously is proper, laughs it off and, gently fondling the two girls next to him, announces that it's time to go because "Je suis fa-ti-gué." He gives the girls' fingers not just kisses but little licks. The girls look like twins. Most of the lords and ladies in attendance are wearing fake moles – not small ones, either. The scene appears to be lit entirely by candlelight. What is this movie? I thought. What am I watching?

I'm used to thinking of Barry Lyndon as both my favorite film and the Kubrick movie nobody else was willing to sit though, but by now, 50 years after its release, only one of these things is true. Kubrick's historical masterpiece is no longer neglected. It's all over Twitter, it's shown every year at art theaters here in New York, and it ranks high in directors' and critics' polls of greatest movies ever made. This took a while. When it came out, the movie was, by Kubrick’s standards, a flop. The director promised the producers that it would make nine figures. It barely made eight. In won a few Oscars, but not the big ones, and the ones it did win – for art direction, cinematography, costume design, and music – seemed to underscore critics' appraisal of the movie as a set piece, well-made but basically unengaging.

What happened over the years to cause the critics to change their minds? I don't really know, but my guess is: nothing, actually. In 1975, criticizing the film, Pauline Kael called it "a coffee table movie." In 2022, praising it, Jerry Saltz said, "Nothing happens." Back then, critics found the movie beautiful but cold. Now they're so grateful for the beauty that they don't mind the cold. Meanwhile the public hasn't changed its verdict at all: the vast majority of people didn't see it then and still haven't. But movie lovers see it, and for them the film's obscurity has been a gift. They get to see it fresh, without the baggage of famous quotations and iconic images. Unlike Kubrick's other movies, it isn't required viewing – it's a treat.

The treat, contrary to the movie's reputation, is not just the gorgeous photography and sets. The film is ridiculously entertaining. When it begins, Barry, a very silly young country would-be gentleman, is in love with his cousin. She rejects him for a British officer, Quinn, and Barry throws a fit and challenges the older man to a duel. When he shows up to fight, the grown-ups try patronizingly to dissuade him.

QUINN: If Mr. Barry will apologize and go to Dublin, I will consider the whole affair honorably settled.

BARRY'S FRIEND GROGAN: Say you're sorry, Redmond.

QUINN'S SECOND: Go on. You can easily say that.

BARRY: I'm not sorry, and I'll not apologize, and I'd as soon go to Dublin as to Hell.

It's really no different from the part in Scarface when the penniless Tony Montana, after a coke dealer offers him $500 to do a pickup, shoots back, "500? Who do you think we are, baggage handlers?" It's where the hero shows he's made of different stuff than you expect. The plot of Barry Lyndon is basically the same as a mob movie: a ruthless young man rises from obscurity to the heights of success before losing it all and going to his ruin.

In Barry’s case, success means marriage to a rich widow, since the movie takes place in the glorious 18th century, in only the most exquisite interiors and the most beautiful mansions and castles. Everything people say about the beauty of the film is true. It's the only good period piece. Every other historical movie looks sloppy and cheap by comparison. I think you need to be as much of a maniac as Kubrick was to make a halfway decent historical movie because it must take an insane level of vigilance to keep the present out. Most period pieces hardly seem to bother and track in anachronisms that spoil the illusion as completely as a boom mike hanging into the frame. I'm thinking of the Brooklyn accents in Amadeus or the feminist clichés in Ridley Scott's Napoleon, which instantly nullify the millions of dollars spent on sets and costumes. Often the mere presence of Americans ruins the atmosphere (something about us is just hopelessly contemporary). But in Barry Lyndon, you actually feel like you're in the past. Or: you feel like you're somewhere else. It's clear that this is Kubrick's fantasy, a fairy tale of the 18th century. The effect is not so much historic as exotic, almost science-fictional. The great ladies, co-star Marisa Berenson in particular, have an otherworldly pallor and hair a yard high. Every scene, including the ones in stables or brothels, looks like a painting. The hats are works of art. Even sheep wear plumed headdresses. The weirdly procedural style of Kubrick's dialog also serves to detach you from the present era and gives scenes of empty pomp or social maneuvering the dignity of a duel. In one painful scene, Barry is eating alone at a fancy club when a prominent member of society, Lord Wendover, enters.

WAITER: Will anyone be joining Your Lordship?

WENDOVER: No, I shall be alone. Thank you.

WAITER: The roast beef's very good, My Lord.

BARRY: Hello, Neville. How are you?

WENDOVER: Ah, Barry. Hello.

BARRY: I see you're alone. Why don't you come over and join me?

WENDOVER: Oh, thank you, Barry, you're very kind, but I'm expecting someone to join me soon.

Brutal. Not that we feel too bad for Barry: Wendover, along with the rest of society, is shunning him because he recently witnessed Barry beat his own stepson viciously in front of the neighborhood's entire assembled aristocracy. Of course, they never liked this parvenu anyway. Of course, this didn’t stop them from taking as much of his money as they could as he was trying to buy his way into society – Wendover most of all. These grand people, you begin to realize, are all petty, self-interested, and conventional. There is exactly one sympathetic character in Barry Lyndon, Barry's friend Captain Grogan, a warm and loyal man who dies about half an hour in. The rest are perfect mediocrities. Barry's mistreated stepson is a sniveling brat. The representative of the Church, Reverend Runt, is a model of priggishness and repression. The aristocrats Barry beats at cards refuse to pay their gambling debts until they have an épée to their throats. This is where the movie is still underrated. It's not simply a gorgeous picture book, without depth. The film's visual bounty – the mansions, the clothes, the famous natural light – isn't just decorative. The essence of the film is the way this opulence contrasts with the mediocrity of all the characters and the shabbiness of their motives.¹

The cold eye Kubrick casts on these Georgian aristocrats has nothing to do with social commentary. It's his method in every movie. His films are populated almost exclusively by mediocrities. Not ordinary, flawed human beings, imperfect like the rest of us, not anti-heroes or lovable losers, but mediocrities: characters you can take the measure of and find wanting. Jack Torrance: failed writer, bad husband and father, who still looks down on his drippy, not-very-bright wife.² The smug, clueless Dr. Bill of Eyes Wide Shut. The robotic humans of 2001. As everyone remarks, the most human character in that movie is the robot. And the only sympathetic character in The Shining is the six-year-old Danny. These are Kubrick's sympathetic characters: a child, an uncle who dies, a computer. (Presumably in AI, it was going to be a robot child.) What other filmmaker takes such a cold view of the people in his films? I think of Michael Haneke, but Haneke is angry about the fact that his characters are so negligible. He's a moralist, concerned with evil. Kubrick isn't a moralist, or a misanthrope either. It's just his style as an artist to take the entomological approach. The artist who comes to mind isn't another filmmaker but Nabokov, who spoke of his fiction in mathematical terms and referred to his characters as his "creatures," and "galley slaves." And in fact they seem to have been kindred spirits, Vlad and Stan. “I derived the impression that he was an artist,” writes Nabokov of Kubrick, an awesome compliment from possibly the most arrogant writer to have ever lived. The feeling seems to have been mutual. I even wonder if the comically abbreviated depiction of Barry's father's death in Barry Lyndon is Kubrick's homage to Nabokov, his version of "picnic, lightning."

In any case, I love Kubrick's coldness, and in the courtly world of Barry Lyndon he found the material that perfectly suited it. It's his greatest film because of its coldness, not in spite of it. Human frailty isn't just a built-in part of his art but the subject of the film. There is a note of dark comedy, of futility, in even the most dramatic scenes, culminating in the terrible slapstick of Barry's final duel. Barry Lyndon isn't secretly a comedy.³ The boom of Handel's "Sarabande" that starts and ends the movie is not funny at all. It sounds like implacable fate. Yet a heavy irony suffuses every scene, especially after repeated viewings. It's not satire but something like the irony of being mortal. All those little historical details just let you get the God's-eye view that much better. Vanity of vanities, you think, watching the elaborate protocols, the luxury and splendor, the gorgeous hats on mortal heads.

1. This is exactly the formula of Succession. The fun (I don’t find it much fun, but what fun there is) comes from the contrast between the fancy billionaire settings, rendered with maximum glamour and dignity, and the total lack of dignity, professionalism, responsibility, etc. of all the characters.

2. I know there's all sorts of visual treasure in The Shining, I think having to do with the Overlook Hotel and Native American imagery, but what I loved discovering were the details in the Torrance's home, in particular the stack of old issues of the New York Review of Books prominent on the screen while Wendy smokes cigarettes and talks to the doctor who's come to see Danny. Jack's an NYRB man; Wendy, as he explains to his prospective employer at the Overlook, with barely concealed disdain, is "a confirmed ghost story and horror film addict."

3. The way you could say of Lars von Trier's films, for example. Von Trier makes very very very very very very very dark comedies.