Barry Lyndon (1975)

Rated PG.  WAIT, what?!  No.  This movie isn't rated PG.  There's no way that this movie is rated PG.  Like, even a little bit.  Yeah, the movie is long and there's a lot of PG content in this movie.  But this movie is a straight-up R in my head.  I don't care if it's 1975.  There's a scene of Barry with two topless ladies having his way with them.  There's a weird sexual undertone to a lot of the movie.  One of the main plot points is Barry's adultery and predisposition to child abuse.  What a hot take.  PG?  PG!

DIRECTOR:  Stanley Kubrick

I am still shaken to my core to discover that this movie is PG.  Like, for a minute, I thought that this might be a PG film.  After all, it's all old-timey.  Old-timey movies get a bit of a pass from the MPAA.  But then there's the scene towards the beginning of Act II and I was just like, "Nah, this is an R-rated movie and I hope my kids don't walk in on me watching this movie."  Like, all of the themes and motifs are more mature in nature.  It's a Stanley Kubrick movie, for goodness' sake.  Heck, I couldn't imagine showing children this movie.  I would even have a hard time giving this movie a PG-13 rating, even knowing that PG-13 didn't exist when this movie was made.

Barry Lyndon was always the gaping hole in my movie knowledge.  I teach elements of Barry Lyndon when I'm talking about light in film.  I may be saying the obvious to some people, but I always use opportunities to teach in productive way.  Barry Lyndon was shot (as far as I understand) with natural light.  It's something that isn't really done in cinema.  To capture that cinematic feel, almost every movie blasts incredibly powerful lights from many directions to blow out shadows and create a heightened experience.  Also, film is infamously finnicky.  Often, natural light can be quite detrimental to how a film looks.  After all, look at every project that a high schooler has turned in and you get the dangers of relying on natural light.  But in the hand of an auteur coupled with an incredible cinematographer, natural light can actually be one of the most gorgeous experiences while filming.  Let's pretend that Kubrick couldn't tell a story. (He, beyond a doubt, can and has done so in Barry Lyndon.  This is a hypothetical.)  Why I teach Barry Lyndon in my film class is that Barry Lyndon is possibly one of the most gorgeous looking movies of all time.  I'm pretty sure that it is was Kubrick's mission statement to make every cel of this movie a Renaissance-era painting.  A lot of that is the lighting coupled with the mise-en-scene.  Kubrick scouted the crap out of his locations.  He made sure that everything was exactly the way he wanted it to be.  Then, he lit it with natural light.

Natural light is a bear to work with.  It is wildly inconsistent.  The very existence of clouds are a bane on the director who wants to work with natural light.  One of Kubrick's biggest cinema sins (besides the fact that apparently he was cruel to his actresses) was that he was a director who wanted a million freaking takes for everything.  With natural light, that is seemingly a masochistic task.  An editor looks at all of the takes and has to not only pick from the best performances, but the one where the light looks the best.  The sexy appeal of artificial light is that it is always going to look the same.  Once a set is lit artifiically, it takes a large consideration off the board.  Geez, the nightmare that this movie must have been to film. 

And that's just for the outdoor stuff.  A not-nothing percentage of the film takes place indoors in these amazing castles / chateaus.  Natural light, in many cases (besides when he reflected the sun into large windows) involves candles.  There are scenes that are entirely lit by candlelight.  Do you know how many candles that invovles?  There are scenes where there are a hilarious amount of candles in the scene.  Again, couple this with the fact that Kubrick was the dictator of a billion takes.  Those candles are constantly melting down.  (As, too, was the director.)  I can't stress enough: the reason that there were a million candles was because it is nearly impossible to light a scene with candlelight.  Luckily, for the sake of cool aesthetics, a billion candles look awesome.  It just seems like this exercise in frustration.

(Fun fact:  I took a break right here because I ran out of time writing.  I have to confess that my headspace is not the same, so I apologize for the change of tone.)  I need to stop talking about Kubrick and his insanity for a minute.  There is something insane that I have to talk about that is going to make me question any blog that I've ever written.  Am I the only one who found the first half of this movie pretty darned funny?  I'm watching this movie and I was surprised by how cheeky the film was.  Now, I'm watching what I think is a comedy and I have the epiphany that I should look up whether or not this movie is a comedy or not.  After all, I didn't think it was supposed to be a comedy.  Lo and behold!  It is labeled on Wikipedia as a historical drama.  Now, given the fact that Act II is significantly more morose than the first half, I suppose that there might be some logic to that.  It's not like the tone of the second half changed.  If anything, the genre seemed to change while maintaining the tone.  But I'm watching this movie and I'm watching the story of a commoner and his constant upwards failure and I find it very funny.

Okay, not very funny.  I'm doing that thing where I exhale out of my nose a little harder than normal.  It's funny in the same way that Pride & Prejudice is funny.  Okay, a little more than that. But Kubrick made this story about an incredibly unlikable protagonist and kept it going for a fairly long runtime.  Like, we're never really supposed to be onboard Redmond Barry's quest for satisfaction.  The movie starts with a slightly erotic game and then, like a petulant child, he possesses his cousin to an uncomfortable level.  One of the things that tends to happen in movies with an unlikable protagonist is that they have to make everyone kind of terrible.  This is a movie full of kind of terrible human beings being kind of terrible to each other.  The only reason that we're behind Redmond Barry is that the camera is on him for the majority of the movie, the narrator is talking about him, and that people are treating him kind of terribly --which tends to excuse a moderate amount of his behavior.  But ultimately, Redmond Barry sucks.  Like, it's really odd that I'm excited for him to escape the British army --despite the fact that we can rally behind his pugilism --because he is a deserter.  But the reason that we tend to excuse something that is really considered rather cowardly is because he wouldn't have to be in the army if it wasn't for the fact that he was part of a small conspiracy to trick him into committing a murder that didn't happen.

If you see the movie, that sentence makes sense.

But I find the movie genuinely light for something that is supposed to be quite dark.  Okay,  I find the first half light.  But that second half is brutal.  The thing about it is, I feel like Kubrick (intentionally!) takes Redmond Barry and turns him into Barry Lyndon, a despicable human being.  If Redmond Barry, young Irish scallywag, is kind of charming in his tomfoolery, Barry Lyndon sucks.  Like, Lord Bullingdon is worse...but it's because of how bad Barry Lyndon treats him.  (For the sake of making a decision, from here on out, I'm referring to the evil, more serious Redmond Barry as Barry Lyndon.)  Redmond Barry, when he steals away Honoria Lyndon from her husband, is oddly charming --despite the fact that I'm very anti-adultery even in movies.  But he immediately starts cheating on her.  Actually, we can probably chart when Redmond becomes unlikable by the fact that there is no strife for him to work through.  We can rally behind Redmond because, as much as he's partially the cause of his own strife, he has outside forces oppressing him.  When he's Barry Lyndon, there is no opposition.  When he does bad things then, he's just a punk.  When he becomes a cad, golly, we're just begging for him to get his comeuppance.  (Maybe Barry Lyndon is forcing me to use a lot of this dated parlance.) 

Yet, Lord Bullington might be the proof against my argument.  Bullington has every right to hate Barry.  As much as I should bond with him because we both didn't get along with our stepfathers, Bullington seems to lack any sympathy in the movie because he's just through-and-through awful.  Yes, Barry hits him.  Yes, Bullington misses his biological father.  But throughout the story, Bullington just becomes more and more awful.  He becomes the full-on villain of the piece, not just in a way that ties the story together.  His climax --from his perspective --is shooting Barry.  However, there's a lot going on in that duel scene that is fun to unpack.  

From Barry's perspective, he's making the quasi-honorable choice for the first time in his life.  His son has died.  His wife hates him.  I get the vibe that he's thinking about someone else for a change: his wife.  His wife has already lost two children --one from death and the other from exile.  To kill the exiled child is just an exercise in torture of someone who is already suicidal.  I also think that there's something truly pathetic about Bullington having this whole duel to begin with.  It's a parallel to Redmond's childish duel at the beginning.  The large difference between the two scenes is that the instigator of the respective duels acts differently in both scenarios.  When Redmond duels with Captain Quin, Quin is shaking (despite never really being in danger).  In the second duel, it is Bullington who is tripping over himself.  When Barry shoots into the ground, he's doign the honorable thing.

It's the fact that Bullington's perspective makes Bullington the most unlikable character in the film.  Bullington knew that there was a chance that Barry would get the first shot.  He's so confident that Barry was going to die in round one that, when his shot discharged by accident, you see this pathetic little child trying to muster the courage to face death honorably and failing.  The fact that Barry gives him an out and Bullington still proceeds to maim Barry gives us an ending that is somehow bittersweet.  Barry wins by not being the worst character in the story.  That's a low bar to cross, but it is ultimately what we're left with.  He survives on an insulting salary and probably dies depressed. 

But at least he's not Bullington.

Man, I kind of dig this movie.  Yeah, it goes a little long.  And my biggest complaint about the movie (and I hate doing this) is Ryan O'Neal.  Golly, I know that Kubrick knew what he was doing.  But O'Neal's performance really sticks out in this film.  Everything seems nuanced except for O'Neal, who seems to be doing an American accent in exchange of Irish.  Except occasionallly.  Sometimes it sounds like he's trying to pull off an accent.  Still, what a choice.  I wonder if Kubrick was playing the long con on O'Neal, but I did not care for that. 

Still, the movie is a masterpiece.  It'll never hit my favorite Kubricks.  But gosh darned it if it wasn't impressive.