Movie Review: Barry Lyndon

Even though I saw this movie more than a week ago, I still cannot stop humming the Grenadier's March. It really stayed with me, and I found myself watching parts again and again. Essentially, the movie is the epitome of the word "costume drama." We see a variety of costumes come and go, and arranged themselves into pretty tableau, but we never really lay an emotional claim to any of the characters. They remain costumes rather than characters, and one is amazed by the frequent breathtaking beauty of the compositions that Kubrick sets up (many look straight out of Hogarth or Gainsborough). Because I like making costumes so much, I feel like almost nothing could be more engrossing. It is almost as if I have seen it, the best movie I will ever see, and now everything else much necessarily be downhill. One thing that it emphasizes about the 18th century is the alien level of courtesy and civility on display. Even the highwayman goes about his business in a completely courteous way, walking Barry through the whole business of getting robbed. The fatal duels that seem to happen every half-hour are likewise very civilized, stilted affairs. It might seem a miracle that anyone could survive a lifetime of this kind of fussiness about speech and regimented behavior without shutting down emotionally, and indeed, we see Barry Lyndon and Lady Lyndon in particular be almost entirely without affect during the entire movie. Lady Lyndon doesn't *do anything* except that at one point she decides she wants to kill herself because things aren't going her way. I think the best shot in the whole movie might be that right when Barry leaves home for the first time, going to Dublin with 20 guineas in his pocket. The landscape looms large... too large. The clouds are not ominous, and in fact the whole countryside is extremely beautiful. But Barry is rather little more than a speck... and we don't really notice him. A few other times, the camera pans out from the characters to examine the landscape and revel in it's lush 18th century grandeur. That's what Barry Lyndon is, at the end of the day, a celebration not of plot or characterization, but of moments of cinematography, of setting.