Retrospective: Barry Lyndon

Kubrick shot a lot of pictures about America, but only one about being an expat. His Barry Lyndon is a man with no country or creed, voracious appetites but not many true desires. He wants to be a wealthy man, I suppose, but he's more interested in burning through wealth than belonging to the upper class. He possesses many things but retains none of them.

Some critics have described Lyndon as a passive character to whom things happen. This isn't strictly true; he's a quasi-folk legend, a literary character whose exploits are more significant than his interiority. Kubrick shows his character more through his adventures than any great dive into his soul. Other characters — usually bourgeois assholes — diagnose the state of Lyndon's soul throughout the movie. They reach the accurate conclusion that he's a bounder, but they don't understand what he wants any more than Lyndon does himself.

Lyndon's life is a folk story catalyzed by history. He's an anti-Great Man of History, caught in the Great Mechanism, stumbling through wars and empires, trying frantically to grab hold of something, anything that will make his miserable and frenetic life a bit more leisurely. He ultimately ends up in a place slightly better than where he starts, but well short of where he wants to end up. Kubrick's finest character.

We can talk about the amazing cinematography another day.