What do you mean by this. I love all those movies, but this one a lot less. I really liked it and I’m sure it’ll grow on me, but it didn’t hit me on the level of those nor of Jeanne Dielman.
On the "all the best people" motif, it's complex, with interconnections with the notions of self-actualization in the last seven Kubrick films. It connects those seven as a kind of single artwork. Set that big aspect aside, the best people is for various characters a kind of dividing line, to step over, and the crossover represents protagonists sacrificing morality, decency, perhaps love, for not just prestige, but "being seen" as prestigious. Being seen as smart, or good, or moral, but not even the chase for the reality, and getting there by hurting others. It has to do with a constructed false self, rejecting being honest about who you are. This video is about
The Crown, but uses the Kubrick conception and explains very well the main aspect:
The photography was stunning, breathtaking at times. The composition and symmetry, some shots looked exactly like Van Gogh landscapes. And I’m not a period piece guy at all but this won me over early and held me tight.
Kubrick recreated actual painting styles of artists like Gainsborough.
"Barry Lyndon. Kubrick's Inspirations."
imago.org
BUT, I wasn’t engrossed in the same way I was with every detail of JD nor was I interested in the era like I am with FMJ, nor did it spur psychological introspection the way EWS did.
The quality was easy to sense and I was thrilled to be seeing it in 35mm… but it didn’t hit me viscerally nearly on the level of those others you mentioned.
I think a first viewing is an introduction, as often with the greatest works. The film is deeply of another time, not ours, with emotional repression outside any range of other films. Subsequent viewings begin to reveal the emotions are crushed, but there.
Kubrick wanted a subdued, cypher of a personality, in Barry, as a person who could in that way move up in that world of grand artifice and confounded repression. Then when he does totally finally lose all that composure-- in crying at a death and rage at family-- it carries far more impact. After you gain that understanding that Barry is the essence of a person trapped in emotional repression, and forces beyond not only his control but his understanding--you then begin to identify with Barry, really begin to feel his pain. This pain is in all the main characters with his as the center of gravity of tragedy.
That is despite the fact that he is not very smart and often cruel, though his cruelty is a reflection of how others have treated him from the start of the tale. Though it happens with every Kubrick film, one's impressions of this work and the main character change in
astounding ways on repeated viewings, and one of them is that you begin to feel the deep tragedy of Barry's life, on him and everyone he is involved with. You feel this as contrasting the overwhelming, unparalleled beauty of the images. The capacity of great art to make you identify with a profoundly flawed person doing things that are really wrong, and still feel their pain is as powerful as anything art can do. It is the essence of the dichotomy of all the greatest and most complicated characters in narrative fiction, from Hamlet to Tony Soprano.
Were I keeping some sort of tally
Barry Lyndon would have more singular great scenes than any other film, but many are so supremely subtle that the potential impact would slip past the casual viewer.
Spoilers follow for this film for someone yet to see it.
*
The film has, amidst all the agonizing tragedy, moments of sudden, subtle humor, and my favorite is when Barry is appearing in a line-up of grovelers before King George III, absurdly, even farcically hopeful to be given the title of a Lord, and he has someone introduce him as a person who has funded a regiment to fight the rebels in America. Like an anvil dropped on top of Barry's pride the King says, "Good, that's right, Mr. Lyndon. Raise another one,and go with them, too!" I laugh
every time, and in its own way the scene is funnier and more harsh than any insult of Sgt. Hartmann in
Full Metal Jacket (another bottomless mine of great scenes). I think I laugh a bit more each time I see it, and it's the genteel upper class version of metaphorically hitting Barry in the face with a pie. In the King's voice is a pleasure, a relish, at saying great, thanks, now go far away and maybe die, to an Irish upstart whose ego is way too inflated. To me, all film put-downs on film must bow before this one by a King.
Another for me. A subtle great scene is a thousand times more rare and difficult to achieve than any other kind, and as I say this film is the ultimate catalog of every kind of exquisitely subtle scenes. The most powerful for me now after countless dozens of viewing is the very final shot, in which we see Lady Lyndon and her son in the attempted emotional recovery from devastation and trauma of what Barry had done to their lives, (she is in the act of signing a check which pays him to stay away from them completely, the thick ink a metaphor for no longer tight finances due to Barry, as they were earlier in weak signatures) and
all we see are the expressions on their faces, with the elegiac, deeply tragic music, and Kubrick is so bravely subtle with the scene that we can tell Bullingdon reaches out to touch her hand... but this is
not captured within the frame. A lesser director shows the hand on hand, and ruins the idea of culturally hidden nature of their pain. The final shot a final statement that exemplifies the emotional repression of "all the best people."
