Barry Lyndon

published	2006 by Echo Library
binding	Paperback
isbn	1406808466 (isbn13: 9781406808469)
ebook
pages	220
description	Not the best known, but by some critics acclaimed as the finest of Thackeray's works [close] Not the best known, but by some critics acclaimed as the finest of Thackeray's works [close]
date added	02-21-07 edit book

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Fenixbird added it

11/12/07

recommends it for: Fiction history books made into movies

Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975) ......Here is a short excerprt from Roger Ebert's review of this Academy Award winning book made into film:
". . .
With "Barry Lyndon," based on a novel by Thackeray, he has a very nearly ideal subject for the exploration of this theme. His hero is a young man that things happen to Barry seems to exercise little conscious control over his life. He falls into a foolish adolescent love, has to leave the district suddenly after a duel, enlists...more Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975) ......Here is a short excerprt from Roger Ebert's review of this Academy Award winning book made into film:
". . .
With "Barry Lyndon," based on a novel by Thackeray, he has a very nearly ideal subject for the exploration of this theme. His hero is a young man that things happen to Barry seems to exercise little conscious control over his life. He falls into a foolish adolescent love, has to leave the district suddenly after a duel, enlists almost absentmindedly in the British Army, fights in Europe, deserts from not one but both sides, falls in with influential and unscrupulous companions, marries a woman of wealth and beauty and then destroys his own world because he lacks the character to survive in it. And all of these things seem accidental there's no reason why they must happen, no theory of life or character that drives the hero to his end.

No theory, that is, within Barry Lyndon's life. But Kubrick examines that life as if through the wrong end of a telescope, seeing it in microscopic clarity. He has the confidence here of the great 19th Century novelists, authors who stood above their material and accepted without question their right to manipulate and interpret it with omniscience. Kubrick has appropriated Thackeray's attitude -- or Trollope's or George Eliot's. Barry Lyndon, falling in and out of love and success, may see no pattern in his own affairs, but the artist sees one for him.

Perhaps Kubrick's buried theme in "Barry Lyndon" is even similar to his outlook in "2001: A Space Odyssey." Both films are about organisms striving to endure and prevail -- and never mind the reason why. The earlier film was about the human race itself; this one if about a rather minor, selfish, modestly pleasant example of it.

There's a sense in both films that a superior force hovers above these struggles, sometimes taking an interest. In "2001: A Space Odyssey," it was a never-clarified form of greater intelligence. In "Barry Lyndon," it's Stanley Kubrick himself, standing aloof from the action by two distancing devices: the narrator, who deliberately destroys suspense and tension by informing us of all key developments in advance, and the photography, which is a succession of meticulously, almost coldly, composed set images.

This must be one of the most beautiful films ever made, and yet the beauty's not in the service of emotion, it's disdainful of it. Against magnificent backdrops, the characters play at little intrigues and scandals. They cheat at cards and marriage, they fight ridiculous duels, they're at their most appealing when they're childish. This is a film with a backdrop of a war that engulfed Europe, and it hardly seems to think human events are worth the effort needed to scrutinize them. By placing such little characters on such a big stage, by forcing our detachment from them, Kubrick supplies a philosophical position just as clearly as if he'd put speeches in his character's mouths.

Some people find "Barry Lyndon" a fascinating, if cold, exercise in masterful filmmaking; others find it a terrific bore. I have little sympathy for the second opinion; how can anyone be bored by such an audacious film, unless they've become such passive filmgoers that no movie can involve them unless it caters to them? "Barry Lyndon" isn't a great success, and it's not a great entertainment, but it's a great example of directorial vision: Kubrick saying he's going to make this material function as an illustration of the way he sees the world.. . "...less

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