The Mighty Kubrick

On 'Barry Lyndon' at 50

On the Set of Barry Lyndon, 1975, Photograph, Getty Images

It’s a gift for the young cineaste to be introduced to certain filmmakers at certain stages of life. The films of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, for instance, are a perfect education for the very young. They teach a fundamental fact. Movies are composed of conventions — frames, movements, transitions, plots, character types, stock situations — and it’s the responsibility of a great filmmaker to idiosyncratically adapt, or else explode, those conventions whenever possible. Chaplin does so with an eye for the gag and a sense for exquisite sentimentality. The Marx Brothers achieve it by battling against every convention, wielding comedy as a weapon against all human propriety, hubris, civility, and taste, and their best films unravel in brilliantly stupid ways that greater filmmakers and comedians will never be able to match.

So then perhaps this cinema of exuberance gives way to the great Hollywood epics, the grand studio musicals, and the more elegant comedies of Hollywood’s golden decades. Perhaps it also gives way to those great “classical” directors — Howard Hawks, George Cukor, Stanley Donen — whom the adolescent may not yet know by name but whose best works establish a more subtle and controlled style. Like the French auteurists of the early Cahiers du Cinéma, our little cineaste will have to grow to a more rebellious age before he can really look back and see that there was something like a serious, thinking artist behind all that composition and collaboration.

Then comes Alfred Hitchcock. Perhaps a bit of Orson Welles too — but the central fact will always be Hitchcock. To confront the master at the right stage in one’s film education is to confront a kind of ultimate filmmaking. He remains the purest of all film directors because no other is better at teaching us how to watch a film. Hitchcock is indeed our director, always impressing on us the importance of our watching. “Look here, now here, now here,” he says, before he pulls back and shows us that the people we were watching are also watchers, and that these watchers are generally in danger of being discovered. Hence the stock Hitchcock scenario: a person accused of a crime they did not commit, or else aware of a crime that no one else believes — itself a dramatization (often a very funny one) of the same tensions the early screen comedians understood, only choreographed tautly over an abyss of human sex, murder, and perversion. Hitchcock is an exploder of convention too, equipped with an art of extreme, pointillist control. He knows precisely what he wants us to see and delights in playing on our need to know what’s going to happen. Hitchcock as a pure figure (just imagine that famous silhouette) is a byword for film directing itself. No film artist ever made it clearer to a popular audience just what a film director actually does.

Which leads me to Stanley Kubrick, who stands in peculiar relation to all these American forebears. The legend kept a deliberate distance from communion with other artists and shunned most influence from the greater world of cinema, preferring to construct his own sterile, private alternative. Yet he still stands, somehow, as an inheritor to those Hollywood traditions of intensely staged and choreographed cinema, whether that of the screen comedians, classical directors, or Hitchcock. In a sense, Kubrick’s style is to Hitchcock’s what a command is to a coax. The mythos that built up around Kubrick in his lifetime — his misanthropic coldness, reclusiveness, exhaustive need for control — is not wrong. It’s clearly there in the films, beginning with Dr. Strangelove in 1964 and running all the way to Eyes Wide Shut in 1999. Kubrick’s films are a stern, declarative exhortation to look. And though they can be quite funny, they’re almost certainly never warm, charming, or humane. They are nearly always about human society as essentially dehumanizing. Civilization and its discontents: the vicissitudes of the human animal.

Yet even if these films spend their time mocking our human foibles, just as Hitchcock’s do, there’s nothing in Kubrick’s filmography with the genuine eros of Notorious or the desperately tragic romanticism of Vertigo. Hitchcock the thinker, the elaborate constructor, is always working in service of a mood, a tension, a feeling. And he will use the entire apparatus of moviemaking to ensure that he can get the audience to where that feeling lies. (Consider how the union of such a wheelhouse of technique, married with the sentiment of a Chaplin, might produce that later modern emblem of the American moviemaker, Steven Spielberg.) Not so for Kubrick. That total control, that command to look, needing us to squirm in the face of the naked humanity he places under his exhaustive microscope, often means that to watch a Kubrick film is to watch an artist who has subordinated film to his own thinking. We see what Kubrick thinks, and he does not appear to be impressed.

Of course, this is a little reductive. Even these disquieting tendencies don’t derail his best films. The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut turn that dehumanization into deliriously cynical romps through the ridiculousness of male egos (the former a satire on the puerile fantasies of the writer in isolation; the latter a meditation on the abstract emptiness and sexlessness of Tom Cruise). In contrast, A Clockwork Orange and especially Full Metal Jacket, in pointing their barbs at a more general cultural mindlessness, end up becoming powerful but exhausting, violent, nearly empty products themselves. Perhaps this is the point. One can never quite know with Kubrick exactly who the joke is on, though it’s at least guaranteed that it’s partially on those rulers of society who insist they control the narratives of our world. If this sounds like a somewhat bargain-bin Marxism, well, there’s something a bit impish and shallow about Kubrick, all the more pronounced for being diverted into such weighty, self-important cinematic monoliths.

Of course, in his finest moments, none of this matters. Should our young cineaste be lucky enough to see 2001: A Space Odyssey on the cusp of adolescence (as this one was, at the age of 11 or 12), there can be no better introduction to the seemingly infinite possibilities of cinema. Even the heaviest facets of Kubrick’s style tend to disappear in the course of 2001 — space, time, and cosmology turn out to be too big a canvas for even the most controlling of cinematic thinkers. The film gets away from him, in the best possible way, and goes galloping off into the largest of cosmic questions, which no one could possibly answer. Sure, there’s plenty of satire on humankind’s scientific hubris: HAL 9000 remains the ultimate AI nightmare, and the famous match cut from bone to spaceship is, after all, a metaphor which works both ways. But it’s the pageantry that really does it: Kubrick wants to dazzle us with things we’ve never seen, at a level of detail, eeriness, and beauty that no science fiction film has ever surpassed. And dazzle us he does, giving a greater elegance to the questions posed by the film — an elegance only the other of Kubrick’s true masterpieces achieves.

If 2001 dignifies Kubrick’s chilly project with a genuine sense of wonder at the universe (and humankind’s existence in it), Barry Lyndon achieves something perhaps more difficult: a sense of the human being in history. This is what occurred to me as I sat down last week to watch the extraordinary new 4K restoration of the film at the Prince Charles Cinema. Though of course it’s still icy, aloof, and unsparing, Barry Lyndon manages to be Kubrick’s most human film. Certainly, in its commitment to total detail and its evident pictorial beauty, it argues for itself as an aesthetic experience even before it hits you with the sheer distancing effects of its tableaux vivants or its refusal to indulge in anything like psychological portraiture. At the time it was released in 1975 — right in the middle of the angst and energy of 1970s New Hollywood — these qualities struck many people as purposelessly alienating. In her review of the film, Pauline Kael essentially chalked it all up to a composed but ultimately airless expression of the same old Kubrick fetishes, a procession of gorgeous images with nothing much else to recommend them.

The fetishes are certainly still there. But watching it again on the big screen with a very interested, responsive audience, I found that only the most pronounced moments in the Kubrickian mode (a too-wide-angle shot here, a clunky handheld there) have dated. The rest has remained as completely singular and out of time as 2001. The sheer gorgeousness of every moment is argument enough. (Seriously, if the new restoration is coming to a big screen near you, do not skip out on the experience.) It’s Kubrick on the heights.

Redmond Barry’s story begins with a fateful duel that sets him on his path and ends with another that causes his disgrace. In between, he bounces from one European army to another, becomes a double agent and a professional gambler, and finally marries his way into the nobility, only to ruin the entire aristocratic family financially. Naturally, Kubrick’s take on the story is uninterested in Redmond Barry as a person, and Ryan O’Neal plays him as a pouting sentimental cipher, a charlatan and a survivor buffeted by history, incapable of change. All the while, Michael Hordern’s exquisite narration is always a step ahead of the character, armed with prose right out of William Makepeace Thackeray’s original picaresque novel.

The real subject of the film is something like the sweep of time — yet also the wars and debaucheries and absolute ossification of the European aristocracy, so many infantilized mummies in powdered faces, always disdainful and bored. Barry’s world is one of ritualized violence at the mass civilizational level, and we’re with him as he schemes his way into the class that benefits most from it. But in the end he’s as pathetic as anyone, cruel to his wife and abusive of his stepson, redeemed only by his total love for his little boy, Bryan. When the child dies, we finally see Barry the human being, for a moment, crying over the boy’s bed. It’s an anachronistic Victorian commonplace on Thackeray’s part — the sentimental death of the sickly child. Yet Kubrick leans so far into the maudlin scene that it revolves right past the film’s general irony until it comes back around to sentiment again. The death scene is fascinating, a real test case for the film as a whole: somehow the Kubrickian distance becomes the perfect medium for a 19th-century author’s vision of an 18th-century rogue.

It’s all there in the grandeur of the great “Sarabande” from Handel’s 11th Harpsichord Suite, which provides the film’s weightiest moments — the opening, the first duel, the funeral of Barry’s son, et al. But also in the “Andante” from Schubert’s Second Piano Trio, which forms the stately, ironic underpinning of the second half of the film. It’s as unclassifiable as Barry Lyndon itself: moody, minor key yet gliding and grand in a palatial way. Pure Schubert. Stirring and romantic, though very much couched in the Mozartian classical perfection that came before it, just like the world of the ancien régime in which Barry Lyndon is actually set. It’s refined, thinking music for the Age of Sensibility and Enlightenment, while Handel’s “Sarabande” gives the film another pole and necessary anchor in its mournful Baroque threnody. Then there’s The Chieftains’ absurdly lush Irish “Love Theme,” which feels as though it should be complementing something far more wistful and earnest than what we actually find on screen. All of this combines with Kubrick’s taste for repeated shots slowly zooming out to reveal their figures against impossibly detailed landscapes and architecture. The film presents life as a historical frieze, as deliberate literary artifice. Perfectly Kubrickian.

The stories of the film’s obsessive production are well known: special lenses from NASA, the painstaking reproduction of natural light, intimate period details of costume and decoration, the influence of Hogarth and Watteau. And yet what it all adds up to in the end feels as slight and shadowy as Redmond Barry himself. History, Kubrick seems to suggest, is grand and deadly; then it’s over. “They are all equal now,” says the epilogue. Whole civilizations rise and fall, poor people are ground to bits, the rich eat well, and a few schemers manage to make their mark for a while, though all fall eventually. It’s the film’s rich, haunted emptiness which lingers — all the gilt palaces and enormous gardens, occupied by trapped figures who never seem to feel any joy, who never transcend their surroundings. The lives of the rest are, of course, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. So Kubrick seems to say. Yet if that’s true, and his vision of the sad mirage of humanity’s hubris is the ultimate point, there remains a single unanswered question, like what one might finally ask of God (surely amusing Kubrick himself to no end): Why make it all so beautiful?

Sam Jennings, The Metropolitan Review’s film critic, is an American writer living in London. He is the Poetry Editor at The Hinternet, and he runs his own Substack, Vita Contemplativa. For those interested, his Letterboxd account can be found here.