Well, I took another trip to the Kubrick Well today. Despite my initial lukewarm reception of Barry Lyndon I've been persuaded to rewatch the film as it supposedly improves with repeat viewings. Sadly, this was not the case with me. A lot of what I said will be redundant to those of you who read my earlier, scathing review back in November, though hopefully some stuff will be explored in more detail. This is a film I really want to like, but can't.
As before I really like the first half of the movie, at least through the Ireland and Seven Years' War scenes. They're full of caustic, dry humor, fine performances and great set-pieces (the duel, Arthur O'Sullivan as Captain Feeny, the battle scenes, Barry's encounter with Potzdorf, Barry's decoration, the intro to Lady Lyndon). The supporting cast is uniformly excellent, even those actors I overlooked last time I watched; it's too bad that the film's leads are a bewigged block of wood and a catatonic dress-up doll. The movie starts to slip a bit during the scenes with the Chevalier (the reason given for Barry's defection is horribly unconvincing and effectively marks where the film starts to go downhill), encountering narrative drift and the first of many well-composed but interminable scenes consisting of well-dressed people sitting around whilst beautiful music plays on the soundtrack, but it's still watchable, and the act ends on a high note with Frank Middlemass's great scene as Lord Lyndon. I'd give the first half a high 7/10; entertaining and interesting, not truly great perhaps, but worth my time.
The second half of the movie, however, is pretty much unbearable. It's like staring at a painting for seventy minutes and about as satisfying; the great music and visual splendor wears itself out before too long simply because there's nothing of interest going on. There's no emotional connection to the characters, no narrative drive, no interesting story (rather a treacly, insipid soap opera), none of the early parts' humor, no themes worth consideration (the aristocracy of Georgian England weren't nice people? Shocker), no reason at all to give a damn about what's going on onscreen really. Presumably we're supposed to be enraptured by the gorgeous art direction but this only works up to a point.
Not to mention, I find the narrator insufferable in the later passages of the film. I will grant I enjoy his snarky commentary on the early segments of the film, when the film functions on some level as a satire and such commentary is appropriate, but as Barry's life falls apart (and the story devolves into soap opera) it just seems cruel and mean-spirited to the extreme. This part of the film is perhaps the strongest argument for Kubrick as anti-humanist cynic. And even that wouldn't bother me that much (who says a filmmaker has to love the characters he portrays?) if something worthwhile were going on! But nothing is! It's redeemed a bit by the wonderful Barry-Bullingdon duel but it ends on as empty and uninteresting a note as it's been chugging along under for the past hour and a half or so.
I feel a need to raise a dissent on the issue of the film's cinematography and art direction. Certainly it's a beautiful film, but it's not a beauty I particularly like. It's an aesthetically distant type of beauty, flat, dull and uninteresting - very pretty to be sure, but to what end? Kubrick shoots the film with rote camera movements of the sort that the likes of Fred Zinnemann get routinely criticized for. It certainly looks nice but it doesn't amount to much because, not only is much done with it beyond producing an endless series of pretty pictures, for much of the film there's rarely anything interesting going on within the shots themselves. Compared to Lean or Leone or Hitchcock's films, or even Kubrick's own 2001, A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, the cinematography is empty and uninteresting, the kind of stuff that we're supposed to appreciate and admire rather than enjoy. If you enjoy it, power to you, but that does not apply to me. In my opinion, truly great films are both artistically sound and entertaining. If I had to chose one or the other though, I'd generally choose the latter.
So yeah, I still don't like Barry Lyndon. It's a film of great individual scenes and moments but fails as a whole. I gave it another shot, and it appealed to me roughly as it did the first time around. I might be generous enough to give the film a bump from a 5 to 6, but that's about it, I fear.
As I did with my last review, though, I'll provide you with something to balance out my bitching: a nice interview with Kubrick on the film. Give it a look.
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