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The Alien Majesty of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon Warner Bros.

A new Criterion Collection release of the 1975 period piece highlights just how
unique the directors vision of the past was.
DAVID SIMS
OCT 26, 2017 | CULTURE

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Every time I watch Barry Lyndon, my eye is immediately drawn to the candles.
Theyre in dozens of scenes in Stanley Kubricks 1975 classic historical drama,
sometimes as the only form of lighta miraculous achievement of
cinematography that required special camera lenses borrowed from NASA. With
any Kubrick work, theres a magisterial sense of control and overreach present in
every frame, an approach that helped make him the (sometimes clichd)
embodiment of the auteur filmmaker. In Barry Lyndon, that attention to
extravagant detail lies in those candles, which can make the most epic manse feel
chillingly intimate.

The behind-the-scenes features on the Criterion Collections remastered release

of Barry Lyndon, out this month, make it clear just what a struggle it was to light
scenes with tiny flames. Capturing even a still image with so little illumination is
a challenge; using a film camera was much harder, necessitating the use of
gigantic lenses developed for NASAs moon landings. Beyond that, candles
themselves are ill-suited to the hermetic environment of a movie set. [They]
would burn down very quickly, people had to refuel every time and they give off
an enormous amount of smoke, the focus puller Douglas Milsome recalls in a
documentary included on the Criterion disc. You would open all the windows,
put the [fans] on, extract all the dirt and dust and the smell, because it eats up
oxygen.

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Barry Lyndon is the kind of film that deserves to be seen on the biggest screen
possible. Theres a good reason its revived with some frequency at major
repertory cinemas, sometimes with a live orchestra to replicate its memorable
score (which consists entirely of classical pieces, especially Handels Sarabande
from his Keyboard suite in D minor). But the Criterion effort to replicate Barry
Lyndons cinematic impact is impressive. The Blu-ray has a similarly hypnotic
impact at home as it does in the theater, drawing the audiences focus to the
surprising details in the background of each long, stately shot. Its a movie that
actually makes the past look otherworldly, unlike many period pieces, which
strive to make history seem easy to slip into.

Based on the novel The Luck of Barry Lyndonby William Makepeace Thackeray,
Kubricks film chronicles the rise and fall of an opportunistic 18th-century
Irishman who ascends, through a mixture of luck and ambition, to success and
nobility and then experiences a similarly dramatic decline. Barry (Ryan ONeal) is
a frustrating, foolish, and often unknowable protagonist, prone to hot-headed
and cowardly behavior, capable of both great empathy and callousness for those
closest to him.

The character is an unsurprisingly clear-eyed take on the picaresque heroa man

who vaults from a low status into aristocracy but seems to exist only as a vehicle
for the audience to witness the general amorality of the elite. Kubrick wants to
keep Barry Lyndon at arms length: He employs deliberate, majestic shots of
battlefield landscapes and sumptuous mansions that zoom farther and farther
out, filling in more of the environment around the protagonist while pulling the
audience away from him.

The setting doesnt make sense to the modern eye, and is

even more engrossing because of it.

When Kubrick picked Barry Lyndon as his next project, the director was at the
forefront of futurism, having made 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 and A
Clockwork Orange in 1971. After these films, Lyndon was an odd choice, a turn
back to the historical dramas that had helped make Kubricks name (like Paths of
Glory and Spartacus). But the 18th-century high society the director depicts is just
as unsettling as the austere spaceships of 2001 and the violent dystopia of A
Clockwork Orange. The scenery Kubrick conjures is deeply foreign and gorgeous
to behold, reminiscent of the giant canvas landscapes of painters like William
Hogarth that he used as inspiration.

That feeling of alienation matters because Barry is an interloper wherever he

goes, first bouncing through the English and Prussian armies, then becoming a
high-stakes gambler in Europe, then marrying into nobility and taking the title of
Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson). So many of Kubricks shots are entrancing in
their utter lack of movement, taking in a tableau of people seated for dinner or
playing cards, with only their hands in motion. And then there are those magical
candles, which help authentically recreate a time about which much has been
forgotten. It all adds up to a setting that doesnt make sense to the modern eye,
and is even more engrossing because of it.

Like many a Kubrick film, Barry Lyndon debuted to mixed reviews, with many
critics considering it too cold and august for the very personal tale of triumph and
tragedy being told. The response was enough to drive Kubrick to choose
something more commercial for his next movie: the Stephen King adaptation The
Shining, which would come out five years later. But ever since my first viewing,
Barry Lyndon has been one of my favorite Kubrick works, a window onto the past
that actually tries to wrestle with how intimidating that world should appear to an
outsider. If youve never seen it, theres no better time to light a few candles and
soak it all in.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DAVID SIMS is a senior associate editor at The Atlantic, where he covers culture.

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