Barry Lyndon is a film that I think I would have hated 10 years ago. And I doubt I would have liked it much 5 years ago. But now, this year, this week – I think that it’s absolutely remarkable. Beautiful, rich and completely engaging. I don’t know what this says about me at the age of 31. How I’ve changed as a film-goer and a movie lover in the last 5 years is up for debate.
Let me describe the film a little.
Is there a word slower than glacial? This movie is best described as a parade of paintings, with, at times, only the briefest of movement on-screen. Kubrick returns again and again to extreme close-ups that pull back, back, back, waaaaay back to reveal large and stunningly composed master shots. Under the narration, this gives the movie a vague feeling of being a documentary about the period or museum piece – as though we’re watching oil paintings while a story is being told. And yet, the film is never boring. Not once was I bored.
But the look of Barry Lyndon. Holy jumpin’ Jesus in a corset. Breathtaking. What follows is without hyperbole: This might be the single best presentation of a film that I have ever seen on DVD, and yet it’s a movie that most people will never watch. I’m not talking about any technical achievement here – let Lucas take those trophies. I’m talking about a film that absolutely gets the most out of the capabilities of the DVD format. I can only imagine how muddy this movie must’ve looked on VHS, but on DVD – it’s sharp and intricate and captures colours that I've never seen on a TV screen. In fact, the picture is so rich and detailed that I (literally) had to pause the picture at a few moments just so I could play a little game of Where’s Waldo with the scenery. There are images of European castles, countryside and people that are as dazzling as anything I have ever seen on film. Quite frankly, I didn’t know these things could be done with film. I’ve read that Kubrick shot the film using only natural light (sunlight and candlelight for the indoor sequences) and that he obsessively studied 18th Century paintings for the look of the movie. It’s pretty obvious that he spent an insane amount of time on this cinematography. The movie is a parade of Victorian art, seen through a 1970’s art house filter.
All of this makes it sound mighty fartsy, and it is. Truth is there’s enough fops and dandies in this movie to populate a whole whack of costume dramas. But at the same time, it’s so breathtaking to watch that I can see myself sitting through it dozens more times. And to my great surprise, it’s laugh-out loud funny.
Perhaps it’s that I’ve gotten to know Kubrick a lot better in the last decade. I can still remember that the first viewing of 2001 was tremendously jarring and even The Shining (which was probably the second Kubrick film I ever saw) was difficult to enjoy at first pass. This was probably 12 or 15 years ago. In hindsight, the latter is the most user-friendly Kubrick film in existence. Barry Lyndon, on the other hand, might be the most inaccessible. It suffers from all of those things that Kubrick is accused of being: cold, pensive and (seemingly) dispassionate. And expecting those traits, I found it to be none of those things. Reserved, sure – but this is an 18th Century costume drama, after all. If anything, the movie is like a coiled spring, maintaining an even manner even as a string of emotional time bombs are being readied to blast off. There is a LOT going on all the time. And the sense of growing dread in the last hour of the film is almost unbearable.
Not to mention that when there IS action, it’s pretty spectacular. There are a handful of fight scenes in this movie that are downright dirty – nasty, realistic, hair-tugging scraps. In contrast to the thoughtful and willfully posed majority of this movie, the fist fights feel unrehearsed and 100% authentic. [On the subject of fisticuffs, I was delighted to see Pat Roach show up in an early scene to put a good ol’ fashioned smack-down on Barry. Anyone not familiar with the name of this actor would recognize him in an instant the minute he pulled up his shirt and put up his beefy dukes – it’s the bald, shirtless nazi from Raiders of the Lost Ark who ultimately winds up in the propeller blades.]
I did something a little different with this movie and it worked well. Monday night (this week) was absolute havoc as T. and I played tag with the Saturn dealership over our upcoming lease. I’m pretty firm about avoiding interruptions and distractions for my Monday night movies. It’s the only night of the week that I ask T. to fend with O. regardless of what happens (there’ll be exceptions, of course – but I’m talking about the general business of putting her down and dealing with her if she wakes up.) But this week, there were phone calls and car conversations and dinners to make all through my movie. The result was a pretty splintered affair. And this being my first 3-hour movie, I couldn’t realistically finish it in one night.
So I chose a fine looking spot and made a break. (The joke was on me - about 10 minutes later, there was an actual Intermission in the movie that would’ve worked better.) And here’s what happened, as happens with all the best movies that I watch over a number of viewings (case in point: Once Upon a Time in the West).The movie got better in chapters! It was the last thing I thought about when I went to sleep on Monday night and the first thing that popped in there Tuesday morning. And kind of like a book that really gets going, I couldn’t wait to get back to what happened next.
Since I’ve brought up Once Upon a Time in the West, I also want to add the final duel in Barry Lyndon to my new and suddenly explosive list of top 5 movie showdowns. There is a gun fight in the last 20 minutes of this picture that has to be seen to be believed. The entire affair is so deliberate and drawn out that it literally takes almost 10 minutes for three shots to be fired. There is vomiting involved. All of this got me to thinking that the world needs more old-fashioned gun fights. I’m not talking about gunfire in the barrio here – I’m talking gentlemen with pistols at dawn, moderated by strict rules of conduct. (“Are you ready to be fired upon?”) Seems classy and at the same time, absolutely insane to think that people could stand still and wait for their opponent to shoot at them. Sort of like a contest of “bagging” (The winner is always the guy who goes first.)
I don’t know if I’m ready to call this the best movie of the Monday line-up yet, but it’s damn close. Time will tell where the favorites shake out, but this one’ll probably float at the top. In the meantime, it’ll be dueling with Stagecoach in the street as only John Wayne and Barry Lyndon can. Goddamn, this is Monday project was a good idea.
Next week T. and I are in Florida, but I’ll get to All About Eve when we get home.
J.
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