Critical Response:
Barry Lyndon divided the New York critics, ten of whom, led by Time‘s Richard Schickel and The New York Times‘s Vincent Canby, wrote favorably of it, with eight writing unfavorably.
Perils of Pauline
The opening of any new Stanley Kubrick film had become an occasion for the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael to dread–and upon seeing it, to dismiss.
In the wake of 2001 and A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick had been all but deified by the mainstream media.
The combination of his reputation as one of filmland’s true intellectuals and his attention-getting ways of making movies had many critics and reporters poised to salute his every effort as a Great Cultural Landmark.
Barry Lyndon is based on Thackeray’s novel about a penniless Irish rogue who rises to dizzying wealth and social position in the mid-eighteenth century. Kubrick’s film moved at a perfect adagio tempo that was nevertheless surprisingly novel and hardly ever dull.
Kael barley acknowledged the film’s visually arresting quality and found its first segments mesmerizing. She thought the novel had probably intrigued Kubrick because of its “externalized approach,” which he had devised a way of matching in stately pictorial terms. But she felt that he had missed Thackeray’s lighthearted, satirical tone. For her, the movie wore out its welcome fairly soon. “As it becomes apparent that we are to sit and admire the lingering tableaux,” she wrote, “we feel trapped. It’s not merely that Kubrick isn’t releasing the actors’ energies or the story’s exuberance but that he’s deliberately holding the energy level down.”
She couldn’t help jabbing Kubrick in a rather personal way when she wrote of her disappointment in seeing the picture’s “slack-faced and phlegmatic” star, Ryan O’Neal, “his face straining with the effort to be what the Master wants—and all that Kubrick wants is to use him as a puppet.”
Every frame of it was a reflection of the director’s self-importance. “Kubrick isn’t taking pictures in order to make movies, he’s making movies in order to take pictures,” she wrote.
She also expressed her desire that Kubrick “would come home to this country to make movies again, working fast on modern subjects” such as his early, expert noir thriller The Killing.
There was further divisiveness at that year’s voting for the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, which Rex Reed reported in his column in the Daily News.
“I think it is important to remind everyone that Barry Lyndon was the head-on favorite of many of the voters,” he complained, “losing out in the third ballot only because the absentee critics lost their rights to proxies. I was voting for Barry Lyndon all the way.”
Rex Reed, like many others, was incensed that Nashville took the Best Picture prize both from the NYFCC and the National Society of Film Critics.
