Word: thackeray
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...discerning student of English with an M.A. from the University of Chicago, approached her work with firm opinions. "My assumption," she once said, "is that the standard of literate English still goes back to Victorian English, and that people who haven't read Darwin, Ruskin, Dickens and Thackeray don't have quite the right idiom." To make sure that TIME stories have that idiom, Bachman wrote a 180-page style handbook that we rely on to protect our usage against what she labeled "substandard word fusions (someplace, noplace), folksy expressions (likely used for probably) and bureaucratese (implement used...
...though, it is similar--like every Kubrick film since Lolita, Barry Lyndon is adapted from a book. Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, like his far greater creation, Becky Sharp, is a social climber at heart. Thackeray's attitude to figures of this kind is a mixture of sympathy and a consciousness that they must not be allowed to succeed. Thus Barry ends his life as a poor invalid in Ireland and Becky as a tattered card sharp making the rounds of tawdry German courts. Yet some sympathy always remains for these characters, either because--like Becky--they are so much brighter...
...successful things Kubrick to preserve some of this ambiguity of sentiment. On the whole, though, Kubrick does not encourage any kind of emotional response, and he certainly doesn't give us enough accurate material to go on. The characters are like the puppets Thackeray describes in the prologue of Vanity Fair--neither rounded human figures nor Dickensian caricatures. Kubrick rarely creates human characters--Dr. Strangelove was a gallery of types, Lolita a collection of perverts, 2001 veered from the banal to the superhuman, and A Clockwork Orange was about the warping of humanity...
...suspense. The Countess remains morose, so perhaps we should be unhappy too. Kubrick insists in the dialogue of the last scenes that Barry's crime had been the wanton and irresponsible destruction of a "fine family fortune"--a crime that would undoubtedly have seemed more heinous to Thackeray and his readers than it does to us and, presumably, to Kubrick. Maybe we are supposed to sympathize with Barry after...
...remembered that Thackeray's Barry Lyndon is, unlike Kubrick's adaptation, an eminently comprehensible book. Kubrick's problems can be seen in that he had to go outside Thackeray and invent the only scene with real suspense, the final duel. Kubrick has always altered the material he films--but in the past he has enriched it; in this case he has imposed an artificial anemia...