Bildingsroman - The development of Character

Rating: 10/10 (9 September 2005)

I was sitting drinking with a friend one night talking about movies, art and literature after a Werner Herzog Q&A following the premiere of his "Little Dieter wants to Fly" at the Roxie when the topic of Stanley Kubrik came up. We both instantly agreed he belongs in the pantheon of the movie gods.
"What's your favorite Kubrik movie" he asked.
"I know all the Kubrik fans and the critics hated it, but for me it's Barry Lyndon hands down." I replied.
Long story slightly shortened, he agreed wholeheartedly and pulled out a copy from his shelf saying, "It's the only one I own." Most people are Kubrik fans for the spectacle of the extreme from films like Clockwork Orange and 2001 - brilliant in their own right - but never get beyond that to the essence of Kubrik - Character Development. Yeah I know, it's the bla bla bla the critics whine about being missing all the time, but that's what makes a movie, not the exploding cars.
Barry Lyndon is all about the development of the character of a country Casanova becoming a lord and how his times shaped his character, much in the same way Clockwork Orange is about how language shapes our character.
The Bildungsroman - or Character Development Novel - is most often cited as a German development attributed to Goethe and supposedly culminating with Thomas Mann, but the focus on the development of regular people was the major theme of 19th Century European Literature from Stendahl
to Dostoyevsky all the way back as far as I can trace it to Shakespeare, Homer or the stories of Cuchullain - and most certainly Thackery and his contemporaries from Charles Dickens to Jane Austin.
From Path's to Glory, Spartacus, on to the his last Kubrik is all about character -- even 2001 is strictly focused on the development of human character from the screeching ape to the dying aristocrat in his bed. (When even the development of a computer's character is a theme we are really expected to get the picture of what this is all about.) But he took it to the limit with this one, focusing over three hours on character and boring the action junkies, who were still on the Clockwork Orange horrorshow high, to death.
But for myself and for many others this one is his greatest masterpieces because of that focus on character development. I would really like to see a previous poster explain what contemporary have film plots less "thin" than this.