On Screen

...Walking in the woods, Barry discovers two uniforms hanging on a tree...

...Pigeons wheel nervously around the eaves, the sudden rushings of their wings producing the sound of bullets shattering bone...

...Scenes focusing on some monument of Western civilization?an ingenious palace or a Bach chamber concerto—alternate with revelations of human ugliness...

...But the German smelled a hoax from the outset, and blackmails Barry back into battle...

...The casual gallantry and good nature that served him well when fortune was a series of continual challenges to his ingenuity become his undoing when what is needed is the ability to husband a wife and her fortune...

...Even the intermission works to remind us of the ways we take time for granted—of the fact that it moves in fits and starts and that time lived is not the same as time remembered...

...During the fighting, Barry saves Potzdorf's life...

...It is a luminous and profoundly erotic scene, which Kubrick allows to move as languorously as if his film were a love story...

...it is also about history...

...In the climactic episode, Lady Lyndon's son, whom Barry has consistently mistreated, challenges his stepfather to a duel...

...The nobility, with their enormous false beauty spots, their rouged and powdered faces, look like the painted devils of the earlier film...

...But the figures are so small and the pantomime so stripped of human significance that, when one man falls to the ground, the effect is humorous...

...The passage is the very image of that perspective from which the catastrophes of the past are rendered the bedtime stories of the present...

...The two escape and Barry becomes a professional gambler and cheat, who, with the help of the chevalier, climbs into high society as the husband of a Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson), a beautiful but melancholy woman whose primary attractions are rank and enormous wealth...

...we, on the other hand, suspect his action is the result of a shrewd insight that fate has provided him with another chance at power...

...For a while everything goes well, and Barry, triumphant, is generously wined and dined by a Prussian officer, Potzdorf...

...His tale, though, begins when he leaves home for Dublin because he thinks he has killed a man in a duel over his cousin, Nora, with whom he is wildly in love...

...Their naked owners—whose surprising dialogue Barry overhears as they bathe in the river some distance away—are too lovingly occupied to notice the intruder, who takes the garments of one—an officer—and assumes his identity...

...The Seven Years War turns out to be more dangerous than its handsome finery had led Barry to believe...

...In Barry Lyndon the point is expanded beyond the hypocrisy of social convention to the ambiguity of human nature...

...Kubrick's use of space marks other discrepancies between the way things seem to one character at one moment and the way they are or will come to be viewed...

...The stepson, the offended party, is given the opportunity to shoot first, but his gun misfires...

...The barbarity of civilized society, one of the themes of A Clockwork Orange is a theme of Barry Lyndon as well...

...Yet Barry Lyndon is as ambitious as Kubrick's other films, and its picaresque style renders more poignant its serious intentions...

...Of a particular scene the film's narrator remarks, "Though this battle is not recorded in any history books, it was notable for those who took part in it...

...and having seen this film, we can say of the hero of A Clockwork Orange that he loved Beethoven not out of the goodness of his heart, but because, for Kubrick, evil and art spring from the same demonic impulse...

...He often accomplished his short-sighted ends—usually involving saving his skin or caring for it more gorgeously—yet the consequences of each success had a further reach than he was capable of imagining...

...Yet the technical achievements are far less impressive than the imaginative transformation Kubrick has accomplished: He has used the formulas of the historical romance to make a movie that is as much about space, time and consciousness as the splashier 2001...

...This is the first fight that Barry loses, with his leg, not his life, and the first the audience does not find amusing...

...the only sound is the flip of the cards on the table...

...This, we are told, is how Barry's father died...

...It is raining outside and the room is filled with a pale green glow...

...Fate gives a push to his future when a couple of rather dashing thieves rob him, making him decide to join the Army...

...Neither prophetic nor fantastic, it seems initially to be a work of recollection on an intellectually modest, albeit hugely expensive and thoroughly entertaining scale...

...Events that in retrospect have little importance can so hold us in thrall when they are happening that they seem to be the center of our lives...

...All virgin face and breathy voice, she tells him she has hidden something of hers on her person, that he may look where he will and that she will think little of him if he doesn't find it...

...As a reward he is given the task of keeping watch on a chevalier believed to be an Irish spy...

...Barry Lyndon, then, is not only history...

...The seconds ask the boy if he is satisfied, and in a gesture of heroism and defiance that reminds us—even to the tone of the voice and the cock of the head—of Barry's own behavior in the duel over Nora, he insists that they continue...

...Barry Lyndon (played with a sensitivity that for the first time reveals Ryan O'Neal as an interesting actor) starts life as a poor, likeable, sexy Irishman named Redmond Barry, a male Becky Sharp, and ends it as a lonely cripple who has squandered himself and his hard-won, if ill-gained, fortune...

...At this point the tempo and the mood of the film change...

...When it emerges that the man is Irish, Barry, apparently stirred by sentiment, confesses everything and secretly enters the chevalier's service...

...There are many duels in the movie, and each one brings Barry closer to death, causing us to become increasingly uncomfortable at our willingness to be beguiled by artifice...

...Luckily, the narrator informs us with characteristic insouciance, "an accident occurred which took him out of the service in a singular manner...

...Barry is brought to ruin, the movie suggests, not because opportunism isn't nice, but because it is based on the false idea that time is only a sequence of adventures...

...The publicity release tells us that the candlelight scenes were shot by photographer John Alcott in completely natural light, by means of a special lens developed for nasa...

...The first half of the movie we remember as a series of set-pieces—a duel, a robbery, a wrestling match, the battle scenes—reflecting Barry's beliefs, in effect, that luck rather than character or any process in the universe shapes destiny...

...The narrator speaks of the mysterious and unpredictable depths of Barry's emotions...

...The advertisements for Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, based on Thackeray's The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esquire, suggest another Tom Jones, and it's true that his latest picture makes no obvious claims on our imaginations the way his earlier films did...

...The movie is about a nobody who briefly becomes a somebody, and about fictional events that, even if they had really happened, would have had no significance outside of their immediate context...

...Barry takes aim, and, contrary to our expectations, shoots into the the ground...

...They say nothing...

...And the leisurely three hours Kubrick takes to tell the story are essential to conveying this...

...There the moral was explicit and facile: that the brutality of institutional power is not different from the brutality of thugs who rape and kill for pleasure...

...On Screen THE GENIUS OF KUBRICK BY MARCIA CAVELL AUFHAUSER who would have expected a lush historical saga from the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange—and a movie version, moreover, of an old-fashioned, 19th-century novel...

...Kubrick continues to be delighted with his technical accomplishments...

...The narrator begins his recitations against a scene of a duel far off in the distance...

...Nothing very consequential occurs in terms of Barry's later life, but at the time it is the only thing in the world that matters, to him and us...

...Finally the game ends, and while Barry turns around, she unties a ribbon from her neck and buries it between her breasts...

...They meet in a long ruin of a barn to perform their murderous minuet, and prepare their pistols as their seconds, with great deliberation, mark off the firing lines...

...The second half of the film gives us this unimagined future, and is a kind of unraveling of Barry's past...

...In the opening sequence, for example, Barry is playing cards with Nora...

...The camera glides over her bosom and rests on Barry's tremulous face as she guides his hand to the ribbon...

...A philanderer in every sense...