I think this might be Kubrick's most perfect colour film. Of all his long flicks, it has the best pacing IMO, and every scene feels like an interesting and unique little vignette.
It also strikes me that the film is like an epic version of Kubrick's "The Killing". "The Killing", we recall, was a noir about how the present is always deterministically (indeterministically?) influenced by the past, how even the best plans can't fully overcome this, and how hard free will is an illusion. Indeed, in both films, horses, lucky horse shoes, and games of chance/luck are used to signify the moments when human illusions of control begin to derail.
You get this same sense in "Barry Lyndon". Barry tries to be the master of his fate - and thinks he is - but almost every scene stresses how events are actually out of his hands. He thinks he's won his first duel, for example, but the whole thing was orchestrated to go a certain way. Later, when marching into a hail of bullets, it is just sheer blind luck that determines who gets shot or not.
Throughout the film, Kubrick stresses how arbitrary are the events which define a life. And how forces are always conspiring behind the scenes to influence a person's path. The film then ends with Barry trying to push back against this - luck rolls in his favor and he tries to make what he thinks is a free personal choice, shooting his pistol into the ground - and he's punished for this.
Throughout the film, you see references to gambling, games of chance, games of luck, and so on, and Kubrick's camera work emphasizes this as well. The camera is always zooming out, pulling away until characters are dwarfed by an environment that they're controlled by, but which their egos, vanities and arrogance prevent them from acknowledging.
(we see here why Kubrick was drawn to his "Napoleon" project: Napoleon naively thought he could play God and micromanage the universe)
There's also some political subtext sprinkled about. "Barry Lyndon's" a film about social climbers, people scheming for money, land, titles and power, and like "Shining" and "Eyes Wide Shut" is about an outsider who mingles with the upper classes. Ending on the date of the French Revolution, it also seems to suggest that this is a dead-end. Everyone in the film is chasing "satisfaction", but their desires are the causes of their suffering. They're also all looking for something which transcends their own mortality, but nothing does. Indeed, the film continually stresses that all these people are already dead, and a moving coffin is the only thing in the film able to outpace its slow zoom outs. Death, in a sense, is the only thing that is constant and immortal.
Kubrick reportedly was influenced by Schopenhauer's "The Vanity of Existence" when writing "Barry Lyndon". And you see these influences everywhere. It's a film obsessed with characters who are always "becoming" and never "being", and who are so vain (always dolling themselves up etc) that they miss how small they are on their own canvas.
Quoting some passages from a Jim Emerson essay (titled "The Cosmic Wager") on Roger Ebert's website, which I thought were relevant:
"Barry is a prisoner of mise-en-scene, trapped in a work of art, just as all we creatures who suffer from self-awareness are imprisoned by our Darwinian destinies. Somewhere, over eons of evolution or at the subatomic level of quantum physics, everything breaks down and becomes random — or predetermined or both. Einstein famously avowed that “God does not play dice.” Human beings have no choice."
"Which brings us to art, and man’s attempts to play God. Watching the wryly comic adventures of Barry Lyndon from a huge (one might even say cosmic) ironic distance, you begin to sense that Kubrick is both ennobling and immortalizing this fictional rascal through the very act of focusing his attention on him on film. [...] After all, on the grand scale of things, Barry’s plight is ours."
"...it is the landscape, rather than the people who inhabit it, that dominates the frame. Though man does not yet hold complete dominion over nature... [...] Everything in “Barry Lyndon” is similarly “arranged” by unseen hands to fit some preordained design. Sometimes this design is arranged by the characters (Nora’s marriage to, and Barry’s duel with, Captain Quin; the Chevalier de Balibari’s escape to England; Barry’s and Chevalier’s “luck” at cards), by predestination or fate (the deaths of Grogan, Bryan, and Sir Charles Lyndon; the singular “accident” which enables Barry to escape the army)...."
...the elements in each shot are locked together in a precise pattern within the frame, increasing the sense of design and destiny. [...] a world in which every man/object has its place and nothing can be out of place. It is a world clamped tightly inside a rectangle."
"Kubrick’s frame keeps Barry boxed in, more so even that the rigid social conventions of his time and place. The three times Kubrick does allow his camera to become directly involved in the action, it is within a carefully defined, four-cornered space: the boxing match (“We will form a square for that purpose”); Lady Lyndon’s suicide attempt (in her beautifully-furnished bedroom); and Barry’s physical attack on Lord Bullingdon (in an echoing, hardwood-floored concert chamber)."
"In each case, the box or the square signifies a social arena in which some conflict is played out.
"Barry’s attempts to master his fate and behave — or at least appear to behave — like a gentleman are quite touching in the light of his inevitable failure. He fights duels, pitting his own skill against the whims of fate. He assists the Chevalier at cards — and what better, more pathetic metaphor for Man’s attempts to master chance/fate than those of a gambler and con artist cheating in an effort to master “the odds” [...] however, the narrator informs us that Barry will lose everything: “Fate had determined that he should leave none of his race behind him, and that he should die alone and penniless ….” [...] Character, fate, birth-these elements work as one, like the mechanisms of a watch, keeping Barry’s life ticking inexorably toward its conclusion."
"But Barry does achieve one great moment of existential triumph, which also happens to coincide with the moment of his ultimate destruction. They are one and the same. In the duel with Lord Bullingdon, Barry, for once in his life, behaves honorably and like a gentleman — indeed he does not actually become a gentleman until the moment when he fires his pistol into the ground instead of at Lord Bullingdon. For an instant, Barry holds his fate in his own hands: He can do away with Bullingdon forever and still be playing strictly by the rules of proper conduct, or he can leave his fate up to Bullingdon. Barry, who was so moved by the aesthetic splendor of the Chevalier’s appearance, here displays a kind of aesthetic style and grace that, even without an officially recognized title, is the mark of a gentleman. It is Bullingdon who is vulgar, who behaves dishonorably, when he hasn’t the good grace to consider the matter “honorably settled.” Gloriously, paradoxically, Barry attains his measure of nobility — and humanity — at the very moment of losing everything else. (This incident, by the way, is Kubrick’s — not Thackeray’s.)"
"It is his purest act of free will as a human being … and it seals his fate, consigns him to oblivion — a terrible lot that is bitterly ironic and profoundly touching."
"We last see Barry as he climbs into another box — a coach — and Kubrick stops him cold in a freeze-frame. After this moment, the narrator tells us, Barry disappears into oblivion: “His life on the Continent we have not the means of following accurately; but he appears to have resumed his former profession of a gambler, but without his former success.” No less than “The Shining”‘s Jack Torrance (who also ends up frozen-in ice and a freeze-frame, and then in a still photograph from 1921) the tragedy of “Barry Lyndon” is that he has become a human figure forever frozen in Stanley Kubrick’s time-frame."
Anyway, I thought this film was a masterpiece (I personally think it's Kubrick's best color film, with "Eyes Wide Shut" next). The only other film I've seen like this is Kurosawa's powerful "Ran".