Furthermore, the costumes and the all-round attention to detail (as one would expect from a perfectionist like Kubrick) are also meticulous (not to mention ridiculous - did they really dress like that? Ornate neck-coverings for the men, swooping decolletage for women of all ages? Hair and hats that put modern-day Ascot to shame?). But the people are certainly hard to love. Ryan O'Neal, never widely regarded as an actor with range is here not exactly given much range. His character, initially called Redmond Barry, and only after marrying into money becomes the titular Barry Lyndon, remains a petulant man-child throughout, from his initial infatuation with his cousin
and the duel that inevitably results, through his disastrous tantrum at his (admittedly obnoxious) stepson and the duel that inevitably results.
There are a few sympathetic side-characters, but they step in and out of the story quickly, as Barry completes his first-half rise and post-intermission fall, through it all showing pluck and cunning but no moral character and certainly no wisdom. The story is Thackeray - the novel before Vanity Fair, although the novel is narrated by Barry himself, whereas here we have an omniscient narrator (Michael Hordern, instantly recognizable to those of us raised on his Paddington - oh, and completing the 70s British TV theme, Leonard Rossiter features at the beginning of the film,
just as in 2001) who gives away events before they happen and makes Barry appear as one whose fate was long-settled.
I must say I enjoyed the first half more, perhaps understandably, as Barry, forced to flee his home after his first duel in which (he believes) he has killed his cousin's rich suitor (in fact the death is faked, precisely to get rid of Barry, because the family needs the cousin to marry into money), and, after having all his money and his horse stolen,
joins up to fight for the English in the Seven Years War.
He is certainly brave enough (although it's hard to know exactly what he really did given that he's an unreliable narrator in the novel) and the method of walking slowly towards volleys of musket fire is not for the faint-hearted, but quickly deserts, and after a brief stay with a young mother whose husband is away in the war, is caught out in his disguise as an officer and conscripted into the Prussian Army. After bravely saving an officer, he is further conscripted to spy on a libertine Gambler suspected of being an Irishman in disguise, at which Barry reveals himself as a fellow Irishman and instead teams up to fleece the nobles of Europe.
This eventually leads him into contact with the young wife of a disabled British nobleman (the ethereal Marisa Berenson),
whom he seduces just in time for the nobleman to die. End of Part I.
The second half is his slow descent. He is openly unfaithful to the wife until his mother, whom he has brought over from Ireland, reminds him that he has no money of his own, at which he reconciles. However, he is genuinely besotted with their son,
who of course is therefore doomed, plunging him into drunken misery
and leading to his eventual expulsion from England.
What is the lesson of the film? That is unclear. Thackeray was a sharp critic of war and the class system, but Barry, as Becky Sharp, meets a tragic fate while trying to buck said system. But at the same time, it's not like he doesn't deserve a lot of what happens to him. He is driven by his appetites at more or less every turn, learning very little along the way.
But... if you thought Amadeus was gorgeous, this may very well have it beaten.
