The Hip Pocket #29: BARRY LYNDON

In honor of Leon Vitali's passing, let's look at his most memorable Kubrick moment

We all have movies we love.

Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.

One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.

I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.

This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.

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Barry Lyndon
Ryan O’Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Krüger, Diana Koerner, Gay Hamilton, Michael Hordern, Godfrey Quigley, Steven Berkoff, Marie Kean, Murray Melvin, Frank Middlemass, Leon Vitali, Leonard Rossiter, Pat Roach
cinematography by John Alcott
screenplay by Stanley Kubrick
based on the novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray
produced by Stanley Kubrick
directed by Stanley Kubrick
Rated PG
3 hrs 5 mins

I’ve always had a hard time warming up to Redmond Barry.

As played by Ryan O’Neal, he’s not an easy character to empathize with, forget about actually liking him. It took me a while to realize that’s the point. He’s a social climber, and once he actually gets to where he’s going, he does absolutely nothing of worth with it. Barry Lyndon is a film all about gaining status, then maintaining status, and it’s exhausting to see all of the machinations Barry goes through to try to secure his fortune. Barry’s life is defined by a duel on either end, and there’s something bitter and black about the way he rides fate like a leaf on the wind. Whether you like him or not is utterly inconsequential.

For me, it’s all about that epilogue and the simple onscreen legend:

It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled; good or bad; handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.

That is one of the starkest points Kubrick makes in his entire filmography and it goes back to that idea that Kubrick is studying humanity from the outside, offering up these anthropological studies of who we are. This film is about the folly of so much of the energy we expend, all of it to acquire and maintain things that mean nothing. Maybe it’s the bleakness of that idea that has always kept me at a remove from this one.

Then again, it always feels, at least in the purely “Kubrick” Kubrick films, like all of the protagonists are bugs on a pin, being studied, so I can’t really hold it against the film.