Barry Lyndon ending explained: Kubrick gives the last word to a title card, not to Barry
Kubrick closes his 1975 epic by taking the film away from its own hero and handing it to a caption. Here's how that last half-hour is built, what the date on the final piece of paper is doing there, and why the closing words are not Thackeray's.
Three hours in, Ryan O'Neal stops being the subject of his own film. What replaces him is a sentence Thackeray never wrote.
Part II of Barry Lyndon carries the title "Containing an Account of the Misfortunes and Disasters Which Befell Barry Lyndon", which is Kubrick telling you the shape of the thing well in advance. The misfortunes arrive in order: the money runs out, the peerage never comes, Bryan dies after a fall from a horse, Lady Lyndon attempts suicide with laudanum, and Lord Bullingdon — back from exile, having been horsewhipped out of the house in front of half the county — comes to collect.
The duel is not a duel
The confrontation takes place in a tithe barn, pigeons overhead, seconds pacing it out. Bullingdon is visibly terrified and is sick on the floor before a shot is fired. He wins the toss, his pistol misfires into the ground, and by the rules of the thing Barry now has a free shot at a man who cannot defend himself.
He fires into the ground. It is the only generous act Barry performs in three hours, and it costs him everything: Bullingdon takes his second turn and puts a ball into Barry's left leg, which is amputated below the knee in an inn a short time later.
Five hundred guineas and a condition
Graham, the family's solicitor, visits Barry with the terms. An annuity of 500 guineas a year, paid for life, on condition that he leaves England and never returns. If he comes back, the money stops and Bullingdon will pursue him without limit.
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Barry takes it. He leaves with his mother, and the picture freezes on the carriage.
"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 without his former success. He never saw Lady Lyndon again."
That is the narrator, Michael Hordern, in the omniscient third person Kubrick chose over Thackeray's first-person swagger. Kubrick's own explanation was that "the effect of Thackeray's first-person story-teller could not be repeated on the screen" — so the man who spends the novel telling you his own story is, in the film, spoken about rather than speaking.
The last thing on screen before the caption is a bill
The final scene is at Castle Lyndon, in Wilton House's double cube room, and it has four people in it: Lady Lyndon, Bullingdon, the Reverend Runt and Graham, working through a stack of accounts. She signs one after another. Then she reaches the annuity draft, sees the name Redmond Barry on it, and stops.
The date on it is December 1789:
- She pays him anyway — the settlement is honoured to the letter, which is Bullingdon's revenge rather than his mercy.
- She is the only one who hesitates — Bullingdon and Runt watch her do it and say nothing.
- The year matters — the Bastille had fallen five months earlier, and the order these people spent three hours clawing their way into was already being dismantled across the Channel.
- Nobody in the room knows that — which is the point of putting a legible date on a prop nobody in the audience is asked to read.
Handel's Sarabande comes up, and then the card.
"It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarrelled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor they are all equal now."
The caption is Kubrick's
It is not in the novel. Thackeray ends with Barry dying of delirium tremens in the Fleet Prison in 1811, attended by his mother, having spent nineteen years there. Kubrick cuts all of it, leaves Barry alive and unplaced somewhere in Europe, and replaces the death scene with a judgement passed on everybody in the film at once — Barry, Bullingdon, Lady Lyndon, the lot.
For the record: the film ran 185 minutes on release, on 18 December 1975, won four Academy Awards including John Alcott's cinematography, and was greeted by critics complaining about its coldness. Steven Spielberg once compared watching it to going through the Prado without lunch. In the 2022 Sight & Sound directors' poll it placed twelfth.
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