Barry Lyndon
AT ABBOTS MEAD, Kubrick’s driver and courier Emilio D’Alessandro took the director’s daughters to school each day. In 1971, Anya was twelve and the rambunctious Vivian eleven. “Because of her wild character, Vivian needed constant attention,” D’Alessandro remembered. “She never meant any harm, but it was hard going.” Anya, by contrast, was “very calm and contemplative.” Katharina, Kubrick’s stepdaughter, was eighteen and an avid horseback rider, while Vivian studied piano and Anya took voice lessons. D’Alessandro drove them everywhere. “Stanley’s children spent more time with me than with him, and I spent more time with his children than with my own,” D’Alessandro said.1
The Kubrick family had frequent dinner parties. “Socially, he was very much an American in Europe and did astonishing things that were very endearing,” Christiane said. Stanley liked to play chef. Christiane remembered, “Stanley had a secret fantasy of being a short-order cook. He was very good. The kitchen was a bit full of blue smoke and too many dirty pans, but he was very good at that. He did a sort of American food that Europeans find so astonishing—hamburgers, and then, later on, he was king of sandwiches. He would pile up high things. He was a good host and was trying desperately to tidy everything up so people didn’t say we’re sloppy.”2
Kubrick was looking for another project to follow A Clockwork Orange. He wanted something from the Napoleonic era or the eighteenth century, radically different from the futuristic mise-en-scène of 2001 and Clockwork. William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) was one of Kubrick’s favorite novels, with a wonderful scene of a party the night before the battle of Waterloo. But the story of Becky Sharp had been filmed several times already. Kubrick settled instead on Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844), a rollicking picaresque zinger.
Fleeing the squalid council flats of Clockwork, in Barry Lyndon Kubrick takes refuge in the eighteenth century. Yet Thackeray’s novel has some similarities to Burgess’s. Thackeray’s Barry is an Alex type, a scurrilous charmer and a brute. Like Alex, Barry tells his own story. He is rough, disdainful, and hilarious, with a strong taste for violence. Kubrick’s screenplay alters the hero radically. Kubrick transforms the scabrous swaggerer of Thackeray’s novel into an innocent, a cynical innocent at that. He takes a hero with a defiant screw-the-world smirk and replaces him with someone who seems embarrassed even at his most confident moments.
With Barry Lyndon, Kubrick could have made a tumultuous film full of gusto like Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963), but he went in the opposite direction, creating a work of great poised beauty. Barry Lyndon is a gorgeous, painterly film, with strong echoes of Gainsborough, Constable, and Stubbs. A few times the light seems like Vermeer’s. These effects are especially stunning in the Blu-ray restoration of the film supervised by Leon Vitali, who played Bullingdon and later became Kubrick’s intensely hardworking factotum. (Tony Zierra’s documentary Filmworker [2017] gives a striking portrait of Vitali’s career with Kubrick.)
The movie tells the tale of Barry’s rise and fall. A country boy from Ireland, he becomes a loyal servant to several masters and then sets his sights on a wealthy marriage and a title: society is his new master. He succeeds in part, achieving (and squandering) wealth, and hobnobbing with the aristocracy. Yet a fugitive sense of not belonging always haunts Barry. He leads a vicarious existence, and like Lolita’s Humbert, he never gets over the loss of a beloved, in Barry’s case his young son Bryan.
Ryan O’Neal’s Barry is somewhat waiflike, though physically sturdy. He shares little with Thackeray’s vividly disdainful hero. Jack Nicholson would have made a delicious Thackerayan Barry, but would be hopelessly miscast in Kubrick’s movie. Marisa Berenson’s Lady Lyndon is nearly inert, reprising the disaffected, melancholy beauty she played in Visconti’s films. “There is a sort of tragic sense about her,” Kubrick said of Berenson.3
Kubrick wanted the stolid, plain O’Neal and the languid Berenson not just for their contrast but for their similarity, since they both remain distant from every possible flamboyance. Like the astronauts in 2001, O’Neal and Berenson don’t seem to be doing much acting as Barry and Lady Lyndon. Yet O’Neal especially is solid, steady, and perfectly apt.
O’Neal, fresh from success in Love Story (1970) and Paper Moon (1973), was a big box office draw. On the set Kubrick and O’Neal, a former boxer, bonded over their love of the sport: together they watched films of heavyweight matches. Berenson, granddaughter of the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, seemed haughty and standoffish to O’Neal, but Kubrick was happy with her performance.
Barry is a quietly troubling Kubrick hero, since we can’t be sure of him. Against our better judgment, we tend to see him as a naïve youthful romantic rather than a mature conniver, even at his most selfish and shallow. When Barry first glimpses Lady Lyndon, he appears just as lovelorn as when he earlier looked at Nora, his first love, over the dinner table. We know he is out for Lady Lyndon’s money, not her love, yet we are swayed by his melancholy looks, and by the fact that he never seems wily or calculating.
The status that Barry aims for remains artificial and unreal. He can never truly possess the gentlemanly stature he yearns after, so his aspiration has an air of the tragic. “I never saw a lad more game in all me life,” his lively friend Grogan tells Barry, yet Kubrick’s hero is not at all gamesome. While Thackeray’s Barry happily drinks, whores, and swindles his way across Europe, Kubrick’s dwells in a limbo of unfulfillable hope.
As Geoffrey O’Brien notes, Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon is far richer and more ambiguous than Thackeray’s novel. Kubrick’s film, O’Brien comments, is “almost an exemplary catalog of life experiences, with all their variety and all their oppressive limitations.” Yet for all the movie’s range the world it shows still feels as far off as the noble rank that Barry sets his sights on. O’Brien writes that “the more intimately present [Barry Lyndon’s] reality becomes, the more ephemeral and ghostly the people in it seem. The past never stops being the past; the images freeze and recede into a frame, beyond our reach.”4 The camera specializes in slow backward zooms, enforcing our detachment from what we see. Meanwhile, Michael Hordern’s superbly restrained voice-over offers a continual dose of irony at Barry’s expense, and so keeps the hero at a distance.
Kubrick carefully planned Barry Lyndon’s preproduction. The film’s elaborate sets, he thought, required the man he saw as the best art director in the business, Ken Adam. One day in 1972 Adam, who had last worked with Kubrick on Dr. Strangelove, got a phone call from the director asking him to design the sets for Barry Lyndon:
Stanley said he’s got this film for me and he can’t afford my money. So I said, “Stanley, it’s not a good way to start talking to me, you know.’’ So we had an argument. . . . Five weeks later, I got another phone call from him saying . . . money is no problem and will I do the picture? Our relationship was almost like a marriage in a way, a love-hate relationship. I felt to go through another film, you know, life is too short. But I was stuck.5
So at the beginning of 1973 Ken Adam began work on Barry Lyndon. He went scouting for eighteenth-century houses with Kubrick, who was determined that the movie be shot entirely on location. Adam wanted quite reasonably to use sets instead. He was worried about the smoke damage that might be done to the houses by the many candles that Kubrick wanted to use in the film. But Kubrick insisted, and as usual prevailed.
Kubrick was fanatical about relying on clusters of candles in Barry Lyndon because he had found a revolutionary lens made by Zeiss that could photograph candlelight. The disadvantage for his art director Adam was that repeated takes had to show the candles burned down to exactly the same level each time.
“Eventually I became very ill,” Adam remembered. “Utterly exhausted—because he used to run dailies with me late at night. Stanley could really get away with four hours’ sleep. Obviously, I couldn’t. So I went back to London, and he was unbelievably concerned. His letters to me at the time were really quite touching.” Roy Walker replaced Adam, who, as Julian Senior put it, was “taken off the set by men in white coats.”6
During preproduction Kubrick decimated a pile of eighteenth-century art books, cutting out and studying their images. It took a year and a half to make the costumes: thirty-eight for O’Neal and twenty for Berenson. Kubrick had liked two Swedish films, Jan Troell’s The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972), in which the costumes looked like actual clothes, properly weathered rather than freshly sent from wardrobe. So he hired Troell’s costume designer, Ulla-Britt Söderlund, who worked on the clothes for Barry Lyndon along with Milena Canonero, the designer for A Clockwork Orange.
Kubrick’s perfectionism with the costumes extended to every other aspect of his movie’s mise-en-scène. The look of Barry Lyndon is unique, full of artifice and décor, yet somehow still open to the freshness of the landscape. Though the actors wear heavy makeup, their flesh shines through, and you can see the wickedness in their faces. Class-based cruelty comes naturally to these vain aristocrats in their shark tank, as the nobles first siphon off Barry’s riches and then swiftly discard him after his cataclysmic tussle with Bullingdon.
Barry Lyndon’s shooting ran nearly nine months: with each movie Kubrick was taking longer to get what he wanted on film. During 1973 Kubrick and his crew shot for seven months, mostly in Ireland, then abruptly suspended production in January 1974 because of IRA bomb threats. The next month production resumed in Wiltshire, England, a hundred miles southwest of London. Kubrick filmed at Wilton House, then at Longleat House and Petworth House, both near Bath.
At Petworth House, D’Alessandro remembered, Kubrick hired the magician David Berglas to teach O’Neal and Patrick Magee, who played the Chevalier de Balibari, how to cheat at cards. Kubrick was fascinated by Berglas’s card tricks and tried to unlock their secrets. He made Berglas do the tricks over and over and questioned him at length. D’Alessandro said to Berglas, “When something new comes along, first [Stanley] wants to know if it works, then when it works, he wants to know how it works. And when he knows how it works, he wants to know when it might not work. You can talk for hours about a thing with Stanley.”7
The crucial arena for seeing how things work was, as always, in front of the camera. Kubrick on Barry Lyndon demanded many takes from his actors, typically saying something like “Let’s go again” instead of telling them what he wanted. Murray Melvin, who played the diminutive, wormlike Reverend Runt in the film, explained Kubrick’s shrewd practice of simply asking for repeated takes. “If someone tells you you’ve done a good bit,” Melvin told Richard Schickel, “then you know it and put it in parentheses and kill it.”8
Kubrick was running an experiment on his actors, waiting to see where more and more takes might lead them. “I had a funny feeling that Stanley liked to see the actor break a little bit perhaps because he would see them reveal something else,” Steven Berkoff (Lord Ludd) remembered. “I said to myself, ‘I will never break down—never!’ . . . I started to relish each take. After about twenty-five takes, Stanley said, ‘Okay, we’ve got it.’ I said, ‘Oh, is that all?’ ”9
Barry Lyndon is a subtle, deliberately paced movie, and initially it didn’t inspire great box office enthusiasm. Time magazine journalist Lawrence Malkin remembers flying to England in the middle of a raging snowstorm with colleagues Martha Duffy and Richard Schickel to see a screening of Barry Lyndon, which Malkin had championed as a Time cover story. “About half an hour into the movie,” Malkin recalls, “we turned to each other and said, this is beautiful, but this is not the kind of movie that usually winds up on the cover of Time.”10 Marisa Berenson stared hauntingly out from Time’s cover on December 15, 1975, and it was one of the magazine’s worst-selling issues.
Barry Lyndon premiered in New York on December 18, 1975. The picture cost eleven million dollars and, though it lost money at the American box office, it eventually broke even worldwide. Slowly but surely, it started doing well with European audiences. The film won four Oscars, for Ken Adam’s production design and John Alcott’s cinematography, as well as for the adapted score and the costumes. European showings made up for the shortfall in the United States, and the movie turned a profit for Warner Bros. But MAD magazine’s parody “Boring Lyndon” hit a nerve. Kubrick’s movie demanded a kind of patient attention that the American masses weren’t quite ready for. Barry Lyndon lacked the far-out futuristic appeal of 2001. Instead it was an ornate journey into eighteenth-century Europe with an aura of the art house, including an allusion to Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961) when Lady Lyndon performs a slow moonlit pavane before Barry.
The sheer slow poise of Barry Lyndon, the serene pacing of it, the perfection, never finicky, of each shot, marks it as the mighty opposite of seventies filmmaking, with its ragged, shoot-from-the-hip verve. It is an anti-Zeitgeist movie, harking back to the eighteenth century with its rage for order. Kubrick insists on careful battlefield design in a flat-out absurd yet historically real skirmish, with the British, including Barry, marching steadily to fife and drum toward a group of kneeling French soldiers, and getting just as steadily mowed down, since they cannot reload their muskets while marching. As in many of Kubrick’s war scenarios, utter irrationality unites with regimented control.
Kubrick makes Barry Lyndon poised and sumptuous, but it also harbors sudden scenes of violence, just as 2001 combined the stability of space flight with the killing thrusts of the prehistoric Moonwatcher. The steady decorum gets ripped apart by sudden tumults like the brawl between Barry and his stepson Lord Bullingdon, who fight like the apes of 2001, as Kubrick scholar Michel Ciment remarks—a jolting sequence with Kubrick himself manning the handheld camera.11 There is a rough energy in Barry Lyndon lurking behind its tableaux.
There’s more to Barry Lyndon than there is to most movies, more to every painterly frame. Kubrick often nods to the era’s artists. Like Hogarth, he arranges groups of characters so that they tell a story. One shot, of a drunken, sleeping Barry surrounded by hangers-on, stylishly cites The Rake’s Progress. Marisa Berenson’s Lady Lyndon evokes the languid beauties depicted by Reynolds. Barry and his young son Bryan sit beneath a monumental van Dyck family portrait in Wilton House, the setting for Castle Hackton, the home that Barry acquires when he marries Lady Lyndon. The van Dyck dwarfs Barry and his son, art historian Adam Eaker notes: Barry is still the lonely Irish upstart out of place in this vast aristocratic home.
The detailed pattern that Kubrick weaves in Barry Lyndon is best explored step by step, by retracing the narrative. The film’s story begins when Barry, a romantic youth, falls in love with his cousin Nora. But Nora’s family matches her with the wealthy, cowardly Englishman Captain Quin, played with delightful strutting relish by Leonard Rossiter. Forced to leave Ireland in disgrace after dueling with Quin, Barry is briefly dragooned into the Prussian army (the Seven Years’ War is on), then finds a patron in the crafty Chevalier de Balibari, a cardsharp and con man who preys on the aristocracy. Barry, who has become Balibari’s right-hand man, helping him cheat at cards and fighting his duels for him, looks innocent as ever, but like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, another boyish charmer, he’ll stop at nothing.
Like the self-satisfied Alex in the first half of Clockwork, Barry seems to get what he wants when he marries the immensely wealthy Lady Lyndon, whose decrepit husband has expired while fiercely mocking Barry, his uproarious guffawing metamorphosing into a choking fit. (The scene is played to the hilt with a rich comic tang, one of the antic disruptions to the film’s slow pace.) But there is a nemesis ready to spoil Barry’s plan to become an aristocrat: as usual in a Kubrick movie, the hero’s scheme will fail. Barry inherits not only Lady Lyndon’s money but also her troublesome, snobbish son, Lord Bullingdon, very finely played by Leon Vitali. Barry whips the unfortunate Bully, who gasps and tearfully vows that Barry will never beat him again. The battle between Barry and his stepson stands at the center of the movie, much more than the rather lifeless relationship between Barry and Lady Lyndon.
Kubrick provides a spectacular climax to the Barry-Bullingdon quarrel when Barry throttles his stepson at a concert, in a nasty knockdown, drag-out tussle. Various onlookers pile on rugby-style while Kubrick operates his shaky handheld camera. “I know I hurt him. I didn’t want to hurt him, but I hurt him,” Ryan O’Neal remembered about the fight scene.12
Kubrick sets off the raucous chaos of the Barry-Bullingdon fight with the most sentimental scene by far in his work, the death of little Bryan, apple of his father’s eye (the pampered young boy falls from a horse). Kubrick no doubt wanted this Dickensian weepiness as a counter to the irony exhibited through most of Barry Lyndon, but I have never been able to reconcile myself to it. Here Kubrick wholly surrenders to the Hollywood tearjerker mode that he scorned everywhere else in his work. I much prefer the film’s sinuous, asexual Reverend Runt, perfectly played by Murray Melvin as a thoroughly nauseating figure of virtue, to Bryan the doomed innocent, who seems so out of place here. Bryan’s demise, complete with deathbed instructions to his parents about their forthcoming meeting in heaven, is too direct in its pathos to fit properly in the movie, and in the end he is more a Spielberg boy than a Kubrick one (though Spielberg would doubtless have suspensefully resuscitated him). I like better Barry’s amiable uncle Jack Grogan, expiring after a skirmish, who tells Barry, “Kiss me, me boy, for we’ll never meet again.”
The death of his son is a blow of fate from which Barry never recovers. Bryan, while he lived, provided Barry’s only real delight in the movie. Teaching the boy to fence, he discovers a lightly competitive playfulness he never knew before. The father-son bond is too easy and too winning in this hidebound aristocratic world, and so Bryan must die, Kubrick’s sacrifice to enforce Barry’s tragic loneliness.
Barry, utterly abandoned to sorrow after Bryan’s death, agrees to a duel with the vile Bullingdon, who has returned to assert his filial rights over Lady Lyndon’s estate. What follows is one of Kubrick’s masterpieces: a slow-moving, perfectly paced faceoff between Barry, attired like Gainsborough’s blue boy, and Bullingdon, who proves both cowardly and despicably vengeful.
The duel is Barry’s finest moment, consisting not in what he does but what he doesn’t do. Granted the first shot by the coin toss, he refuses to fire at Bullingdon, and declares he has received satisfaction.
Barry’s grief-induced insensibility gives him an advantage in the duel. With his beloved son Bryan dead, what has he left to live for? And so he behaves nobly, throwing away his shot rather than aiming at Bullingdon. The dreadful Bullingdon, who vomits from fear when he thinks he has to face Barry’s shot, now aims hard at his stepfather. When Barry falls, he yelps in childish joy. (Trying to get Vitali to vomit, Kubrick first tried semiraw chicken and then—this did the trick—raw egg.)
Kubrick began the movie with an extreme long shot of Barry’s father being killed in a duel, beautifully echoing the final scene of Max Ophüls’s masterpiece The Earrings of Madame de . . . That opening was comic: we see the father plop down abruptly in a stunning Gainsborough landscape, with the faraway death cosseted by Hordern’s exceedingly polite, refined voice-over. The climactic duel between Barry and Bullingdon, by contrast, is deadly serious, confronting Bullingdon’s petty vengeance with the nobility of spirit that desperation has brought out in Barry.
The duel revolves around the grimly conventional phrase “to receive satisfaction.” Barry has never received satisfaction. Instead of truly existing, he has led a vicarious life as a pretend aristocrat. Like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, Barry is a sexual hedonist, and he spends money like water, but actual enjoyment remains out of reach for him except when playing with Bryan, who is now lost forever. Barry rises in the world as the hapless Johnny Clay of The Killing could not. Unlike Johnny, he has an idea of belonging. But it remains only an idea, and finally, a broken man, he belongs only to his mother, who succors him after he loses his leg in the duel. Like Humbert, he ends a damned, wretched figure.
Kubrick cannily generates suspense as well as ceremonial stasis during the duel, which is accompanied by what sounds like an Ennio Morricone version of the Handel Sarabande we hear so often in Barry Lyndon. The duel scene crawls along at a stately pace, while birds flutter in the nave of the church where Barry and Bullingdon face off. The play of light and shadow, like the rustle of the birds, ravishes the viewer, reminding us that digital technology cannot yet approach the fine gradations available to Kubrick’s camera. As Adam Eaker notes, a single ray of light contains various tones of the same color, and different levels of shade, and Kubrick plays on this variety.13 Vitali’s 4K restoration of Barry Lyndon burnishes the film and adds 5.1 surround sound, a feature that Kubrick would surely have wished for just as Bach would have wanted a piano instead of his harpsichord. (From Clockwork Orange on, Kubrick insisted on monaural sound for his films because it was safer than stereo: movie theaters often had broken speakers.)
Tony Lawson, Barry Lyndon’s editor, remembered that the duel scene took six weeks to edit. Kubrick painstakingly matched shots from various takes, just as Glenn Gould, late in his career, patched together his recordings from short segments of different performances.
After the duel we observe the crippled Barry lying in bed playing cards with his mother, “utterly baffled and beaten,” as the narrator remarks. The least painterly shot in Barry Lyndon is the last we see of him, a nouvelle vague freeze frame as he stoops into the carriage with his mother, his shrewdest and most loyal companion.
Kubrick follows Barry’s exit with a gorgeous sterile tableau, the wordless shot-reverse-shot between Bullingdon and Lady Lyndon that ends the movie. As she signs over living expenses to her ex-husband Redmond Barry, we glimpse the date above her signature: 1789. A revolution is coming that will sweep away the stagnant hierarchy that triumphs in the movie. Yet mother and son, Bullingdon and Lady Lyndon, now reunited with no Barry between them, live forever in this moment. (When Spielberg realized Kubrick’s plan for his final film, A.I., he likewise ended with a perfect union between mother and son.) The brief intimacy between father and son, Barry and Bryan, has been shattered by fate, but there is an unbreakable bond between mother and son. This difference echoes Kubrick’s own relation to his parents: from his mother he received open-ended approval, from his father the ambition to be a doctor, which Kubrick the son frustrated by nearly flunking out of high school. Tension and disappointment animate father-son relations in Barry Lyndon as they did in the teenage Kubrick’s life.
Kubrick’s parents visited him during Barry Lyndon postproduction in late 1974. Jack and Gert Kubrick came from Los Angeles to visit their son at Abbots Mead, since Kubrick had long ago decided never to fly again, and his last trip back to America, by ship, had been for the release of 2001. (Kubrick as a young man had learned to fly a small plane and been traumatized by what he said was the uncertainty of air traffic signals: all his life Kubrick had a fear of factors beyond his control.).
The family matrix was on Kubrick’s mind. Barry Lyndon, like its successor The Shining, is a notably Oedipal movie. Critic Julian Rice describes the love scene between Barry and Lischen, a young mother who gives him shelter during his early travels: “As they embrace, the child looks up at them with large, solemn eyes.”14 Later on, when Lady Lyndon says to Bullingdon, “Lord Bullingdon, you have insulted your father,” he responds like Hamlet: “Mother, you have insulted my father.”
Balibari is a father figure to Barry, but a more powerful father, George III, fails to grant him the lordship that he craves. He remains Mr. Redmond Barry, and never becomes Lord Lyndon. Telling a bedtime story to Bryan in which he boasts of cutting off heads in battle, Barry admits to Bryan that he didn’t get to keep the heads: “The heads always remain the property of the king.”
Barry never gets to exercise fatherly authority. Like Clockwork’s Alex, he is in the end a grown-up boy, but unlike that happy-go-lucky ruffian, he is conscious of being dwarfed in a world much bigger than he is. Finally he remains a minor figure framed in a faraway scene, thwarted in every possible way. Kubrick’s next hero, Jack Torrance of The Shining, will be another such case.
