Stanley Kubrick's three-hour-five-minute period epic — frequently considered the most-visually-accomplished entry in his filmography and the most-significant single cinematographic achievement in modern American cinema.
Redmond Barry is an 18th-century Irish young man whose romantic disappointment leads him to leave his home village. Across the film's first half he serves in the British Army (during the Seven Years' War), defects to the Prussian Army, becomes a spy, encounters a continental gambling-and-aristocracy network, and gradually assembles the financial and social material that he believes will permit his entry into European aristocratic society.
His marriage to the wealthy Lady Lyndon — a strategic match rather than a romantic one — permits his entry into English aristocratic society. He adopts her late husband's surname (becoming Barry Lyndon) and pursues a peerage with substantial expenditure. The peerage attempt fails; his stepson grows up and eventually challenges him to a duel.
The film's final sequence — the duel's outcome, Barry's subsequent decline and exile, and the cumulative narrative voice-over conclusion that frames the entire film as a determined-arc rather than a contingent series of decisions — is one of the most-significant closing sequences in modern American cinema.
Barry Lyndon's specific visual achievement is, by general critical and craft assessment, one of the most-significant in modern cinema. John Alcott's cinematography won the 1975 Best Cinematography Oscar; the production design (Ken Adam), art direction (Roy Walker), and costume design (Milena Canonero and Ulla-Britt Söderlund) also won Oscars. The cumulative craft achievement substantially exceeds the conventional period-epic working framework.
The specific visual innovation of the film is the use of natural light — particularly candlelight — for the interior sequences. Kubrick and Alcott used specially-modified Zeiss lenses (originally developed for NASA) to permit cinematography at extremely-low ambient light levels; the candlelight-interior sequences could be photographed without supplementary studio lighting. The cumulative working result is a specific visual register that subsequent period-cinema has substantially attempted to replicate but rarely matched at the original Barry Lyndon working level.
William Makepeace Thackeray's 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon is, in some sense, an unusual source material for major-studio period-epic production. The novel is structured as Barry's first-person account of his life, but Thackeray's working framework makes Barry's account substantially unreliable; the cumulative novel produces a complex narrative-distance framework that conventional period-epic production typically does not engage.
Kubrick's adaptation restructures the narrative-distance framework by shifting from Thackeray's first-person Barry narration to a third-person omniscient voice-over (delivered by Michael Hordern in the original release). The structural shift substantially modifies the source material's working register; the cinema's voice-over framework treats Barry's life as determined-arc rather than as Barry's own contingent decisions. The cumulative working result produces one of the most-deterministic narrative-frameworks in modern major-studio cinema.
Barry Lyndon's specific pacing — the three-hour-five-minute running time and the substantially-slower-than-conventional working rhythm — is one of the most-discussed features of the film. The pacing was, on the film's 1975 commercial release, one of the substantial commercial-reception challenges; the film was, by general 1975 assessment, less-commercially-successful than its production budget had required.
The pacing's specific working purpose has, across the subsequent five decades, become substantially clearer. The slow rhythm operates as integral to the film's working subject matter; the 18th-century European cultural environment that the film engages operated at substantially-slower rhythms than the conventional 20th-century cinema framework typically reflects. Kubrick's deliberate pacing choice produces a working immersion in the 18th-century cultural environment that faster-paced period cinema does not achieve. The cumulative reception assessment has substantially recovered the film's standing across subsequent decades; Barry Lyndon is, by contemporary critical consensus, frequently considered the most-accomplished entry in Kubrick's filmography.