"Barry Lyndon" and "Brief Encounter"

Richard
Barry Lyndon and Brief Encounter
Starbucks, June 3, 2008

Barry Lyndon is riding through a shadowy glen that Constable might have painted. A melancholy Irish tune, performed by the Chieftains, plays in the background, and we hear bird song and the echoing snort of his horse in the cold morning air. He stops. Ahead on the path is a silhouetted figure with his back to Barry, and then the man turns with two pistols drawn. We have seen him in the previous scene at an inn, looking on as Barry withdraws coins from a little leather pouch in his vest.

“Good day, young sir,” says the highway man, who introduces himself as Captain Feeney, a notorious and much feared scoundrel, affecting the manners of a gentleman. Another man on horseback enters from the bushes, also with raised pistol, and is introduced as Feeney’s son. In a soft voice but a steady grip on his weapons, Feeney says he will have to relieve the young gentleman of his possessions. Barry pleads with him not to take his money—his inheritance from his mother. Feeney refuses. Barry then asks him not to take his horse. Again he’s politely declined though with the counter offer he may keep his boots. The exchange has the formal structure of a fairy story.

The violence that’s threatened doesn’t disturb the surface of manners and measured argument. A penniless Barry, played by Ryan O’Neil with an expression of permanent confusion, tramps off to the next town, a little more experienced but otherwise unchanged. He enters a scene because he’s compelled to exit the previous one. Before being robbed, he flees a duel fought over a young woman, mistakenly believing he’s killed his rival. After being robbed he feels his only option is to join the army. And so it goes from meticulously etched set piece to set piece, a life forming with little sense of choice or plan, Kubrick suggesting that our choices are framed by inevitabilities. Michael Hordern, striking the ironic notes of Thackeray, reminds us in voiceover that we are molded by our disappointments in a world indifferent to our fate. How could I not be drawn to such a philosophy and such a bewildered character?

At dinner the other night, I told Suzanne that I’d watched the movie again, and she remembered our seeing it in my little house in Old Poole Bank outside Leeds. She said we’d also watched Brief Encounter there and that I'd made a connection between the films. She couldn’t recall it, and neither do I, but I’m wondering how I would compare them now: Kubrick's film (1975) about innocence corrupted, based on Thackeray's 19th Century novel set in the 18th Century, and David Lean's 1946 adaptation of a stage play by Noel Coward (1935) in which a man and woman fall suddenly and desperately in love.

What connects them for me is the strangled emotions in both and the way the main characters struggle with their passions in the contexts of social decorum. In both movies, passion sets people in motion. In Barry Lyndon, we watch a man survive by practicing the deceptions and compromises of those around him. In Brief Encounter, the lovers, played by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, forfeit the possibility of being truly known for the sake of their honor and to protect those around them: Laura returns to her dry, unimaginative husband who reads the paper by the fire in their drawing room, while their son is tucked upstairs in his little bed. Alex, a doctor, journeys to Africa with his children and unloved wife.

The films appear to go in different directions, but the characters in both blend into the morals of their surroundings. To Thackeray, the puny individual, battered by life, has little recourse than to become jaded. In Brief Encounter, the couple’s plan to spend the night together is foiled when Alex’s friend innocently returns to his flat to discover their tryst. His disapproval becomes theirs.

No wonder these themes were resonant when I first watched the movies with Suzanne. Only a few weeks earlier I'd left Kim, the woman I spent two years with after Meg and I broke up. Sitting with Suzanne, I was contemplating leaving England to go to the US. What to do? Leap like Ryan O’Neil into the tide of circumstance and risk everything, or swallow my desires like the ill-fated couple? I have always been a Ryan.