“Though this encounter is not recorded in any history books, it was memorable enough for those who took part.”
After making three masterpieces about the future, Stanley Kubrick returned to the past with an extravagant adaptation of a nineteenth century novel. This film chronicles the unremarkable life of Irish peasant Redmond Barry, a thoroughly ignoble and selfish weakling, as he rises and falls in the British aristocracy. Throughout the epic, Kubrick alludes to paintings: often literally as set decoration, sometimes visually through his shot compositions, and other times metaphorically through a narrator that treats every event as rigidly predetermined. Barry himself is flat, static, immobile, a prisoner of his own nature and circumstances. The background for this portrait, the society around him, is rigid in its own way. The culture obsessively imposes man-made rules upon this chaotic existence: rituals for dueling, war, military protocol, titles, social status, secession rights, marital obligations, and card games. The characters go to ridiculous lengths to bribe and cheat their way around their own equally ridiculous rules. In truth, the dispassionate universe obeys its own laws of chance and causality, without any regard for human concepts of fairness. Most stories begin by looking at the background and then zoom in on an individual. In Barry Lyndon, both Kubrick’s camera and his narrative does exactly the opposite. Perhaps the only way to view humanity objectively is to step back far enough that the humans appear to be objects.
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