STANLEY KUBRICK’S VISCERAL ‘BARRY LYNDON’

by Benjamin Ross

Obsession

Eternal yearning

Director Benjamin Ross, whose debut feature is The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, celebrates the drama of failure in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon

by Benjamin Ross

I saw Barry Lyndon at the time of its first release and despite seeing it only once until a few years ago, it resonated as strongly throughout my adolescence as any other film. For all of its intricately detailed artifice, the film struck right at the heart of my childhood and family experience in the most direct and emotional way. Films rejected on first release often prove the most interesting and timeless. Consider from this period Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Night Moves or, from a decade later, The King of Comedy or The Right Stuff, all films best described as equivocal and ambivalent. They belong to a mini-tradition of powerfully intelligent, mainstream pictures which became marginalised due to commercial failure or a temporary lack of comprehension on the part of studio, critics or public. Other than that, the common ground between them is that each in some way involves its protagonists in a struggle with a culturally inscribed heroic ideal, and each is unable to resolve that relationship except through failure. Given the direction of our popular culture it’s a fair bet that’s the reason people stayed away from them.