The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Barry Lyndon (1975/UK/dir. Stanley Kubrick) appeared at #62 on my original list.
Due to technical difficulties, this post was delayed nearly a week. However, the next entry, on Apocalypse Now, will go up later today, and the rest of the entries in the series will go up at the usual time (every Friday at 7am PST).
What it is • The fortune, good and bad, of Redmond Barry (Ryan O'Neal) - who will not become Barry Lyndon until the halfway point of the film - is framed by a pair of duels. I don't mean the mock-duel in which Barry "kills" a romantic rival, a farcical hoax intended to drive him from his ancestral home. The duel that actually opens Barry Lyndon, seen from a distance, is between his father and the anonymous assailant who kills him, condemning the unseen boy to a life of instability only exacerbated by later circumstances. The brief scene provides a quintessential example of that classically Kubrickian style, coldly distant in its formal viewpoint, fatalistic in its content. The second duel, however, is something else entirely. Photographed in a variety of close-ups and mediums (along with some striking wide shots to convey the cavernous space in which Barry and his stepson Lord Bullingdon, played by Leon Vitali, face off), this duel emphasizes the choices made by the participants, their role in shaping their own destiny. One decision in particular, which results in financial and physical disaster, may also be a true moral victory in a film hardly full of such accomplishments. None of this is broadcast in any obvious way; indeed the film's most crucial implications are often undercut by the droll narrator or obscured by the distractions (however subtly complementary) of the gorgeous sets, costumes, and locations. Many viewers conclude that the film has no emotional core and is simply a series of pretty pictures. This sumptuous, stately, and decidedly unrushed period piece was not particularly well-received on release and even when I first saw it three decades later, my perception of its reputation suggested that it would not compare to Kubrick's more vividly iconic films like 2001: A Space Odyssey or A Clockwork Orange. I finally watched it during a marathon of the director's small but impressive body of work. Within less than a day, I had watched all three hours of it a second time.
Why I like it •
