It was Stanley Kubrick’s big folly, the great director’s lone flop. It was slow-paced and bloodless and calamitously miscast. Critics likened it to a coffee-table book, or a tasteful slideshow, or an interminable tour of a musty art museum. No one, it seemed, was especially thrilled by Barry Lyndon when it appeared in cinemas back in December 1975. The film was unwrapped for Christmas and dutifully admired for a spell, after which it was quietly packed off to the attic to rot.
Now Barry Lyndon is back, celebrating its 50th birthday with a remastered new print – and guess what, it’s brilliant; its reputation is a joke. And while it would be nice to blame those contemporary critics for steering us wrong, I’m conscious of the fact that I watched Barry Lyndon as a student and didn’t like it much either. Perhaps certain films, like youth, are wasted on the young. Possibly some pictures gain texture and flavour with age. In which case Barry Lyndon’s not a book, or a lecture, or a traipse through the Louvre. It’s a fabulous wine from a vintage year, fortuitously set aside as a gift for the future.
Conceivably, even Kubrick himself wasn’t madly in love with Barry Lyndon at the time. The director had wanted to make a biopic of Napoleon, and the film was his consolation prize, a fallback project to ensure that his research wasn’t wasted. Freely adapted from William Thackeray’s novel, it tracks an Irish rogue’s adventures through 18th-century Europe, around the skirts of the Seven Years’ War, and finally to the palatial country estate where he is cut down to size. Barry Lyndon runs a shade over three hours, but the pace isn’t slow so much as it is deliberate, remorseless, like a perfectly choreographed waltz. Kubrick is confident enough to let a crucial scene simmer, or allow a lovely shot the time to bed down and settle.
Even the film’s detractors concede that it’s a ridiculously beautiful piece of work, although they tend to be beguiled by the opulent, candlelit interiors and overlook the magnificent outdoor sequences. Viewed from today’s vantage point, Barry Lyndon frames a 1970s European countryside of thick hedgerows, shaggy fields and rutted lanes that could easily pass for the 1770s but has since been mostly swept away. This is one of the incidental pleasures of the anniversary reissue. The movie folds the Napoleonic era in with the recent past, and implicitly dares us to spot the joins.
“Barry had his faults,” Michael Hordern’s narrator remarks of the film’s antihero, and that’s putting it lightly. Redmond Barry (who will later become Barry Lyndon) is a fraud and a cheat, a thief and a bully. Reviewers at the time saw him as superficial and unsympathetic, and blamed Ryan O’Neal’s performance for not properly fleshing him out. But that’s missing the point, because Barry doesn’t need fleshing out. He’s depthless but he’s flawless, as animalistic as a cat. Barry bounces from rural Ireland to an English mansion, maintaining the same vague, placid smile whether he’s up or down, rich or poor.
According to the critic Roger Ebert, “he’s a man to whom things happen”, and yet even that’s not quite right, because he meets every situation head-on. He’s variously, when he needs to be, a boxer and a duellist and a lover and a lord. He steps up and engages. More often than not, he turns the situation to his advantage. I can’t imagine anyone other than O’Neal playing the role. He embodies Barry to the point where it barely feels as though he's acting at all.
The tone of Kubrick’s film effectively takes its lead from its protagonist, which is to say that it’s dispassionate and utterly unreflective. “No hugging, no learning” was the motto of Seinfeld, except that Barry Lyndon got there first. Audiences typically prefer their films to come with strong moral guardrails and neatly drawn characters. Kubrick’s picture may look like a work of pristine, formal beauty. Inside, it’s lawless and unruly and borderline nihilistic. Human beings, it implies, are innate opportunists, neither good nor evil. This might not count as a comforting message, exactly, but it makes for a strange, savage, and purely thrilling film.
I now wonder if those sumptuous period visuals mis-sold it. It was Barry Lyndon’s fate to land in the fevered heyday of 1970s New Hollywood, where the films were loose-boned and grungy and rarely strayed into the past. At the 1976 Oscars, it found itself nominated alongside Nashville, Dog Day Afternoon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Jaws, thrown into the mix like a periwigged uncle at a hipster party. The film bombed in the US and fared rather better in Europe, although it was never seen as a hit.
Kubrick was so stung by the experience that he signed on for The Shining, figuring that a horror flick based on a bestselling novel would at least make some money. But his long film went on to play the long game; its mysterious nature keeps people coming back. In Sight and Sound’s 2022 poll of all-time great films, Barry Lyndon was ranked 45th by the critics and 12th by directors. Martin Scorsese says that while he loves the more successful Kubrick pictures (Spartacus, Dr Strangelove, 2001, The Shining), Barry Lyndon is the one that he keeps returning to.
Sad to report that there is no obvious happy ending for low-born Redmond Barry, who claws his way up society’s greasy pole only to slide back down again. Kubrick’s pitiless tale shows us the man’s rise and fall, but the film is more resilient and has made the same trip in reverse. It has outlasted its hero and outlived its creator. It’s cinema’s great survivor, and grows richer and wilder with each passing year.
The 50th anniversary 4K restoration of ‘Barry Lyndon’ is in cinemas from 18 July
