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Copying Beethoven

2006, Movie, PG-13, 0 mins

Copying Beethoven: Review

COPYING BEETHOVEN
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If pedigree were everything, Polish-born writer-director Agnieszka Holland, educated at Czechoslovakia's world-famous FAMU school and mentored by directors Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda, would be untouchable. But it's not, and her films are a frustrating mix of the sublime and the ridiculous; this film, written by Christopher Wilkinson and Stephen J. Rivele (NIXON, ALI), is one of the latter. Austria, 1827: Anna Holtz (Diane Kruger) races against time to get back to Vienna, where the most influential man in her life — 56-year-old composer Ludwig von Beethoven (Ed Harris) — is dying. Flashback to 1824: Deaf and thoroughly impossible, Beethoven is in desperate need of a copyist who can translate his scrawls into scores that the musicians can actually read. His longtime manager, Wenzel Schlemmer (Ralph Riach), who's dying of cancer, puts out the word to several prestigious conservatories of music, asking that they encourage their most gifted students to apply. To his abject horror, the cream of the crop is 23-year-old aspiring composer Anna. Schlemmer can't even imagine sending this pretty young woman into the filthy lair of Herr Beethoven, whose towering rages are as famous as his compositions. But the master is waiting so in she goes. After the inevitable rocky start, Anna soothes the savage beast, who's equally impressed by her bosom, her talent and her flinty ability to impose order on squalor. Anna's relationship with the maestro, who embraces the coarse and the sublime with equal enthusiasm, changes her life, for better and for worse. It shatters her engagement to ambitious but unimaginative engineer Martin Bauer (Matthew Goode), but also strengthens her resolve to defy social mores and devote herself to music. Harris' performance as Beethoven is fearless, if more than a little hammy. And while Kruger isn't up to the challenge of giving real life to a shallow, anachronistic character who seems to have been created for the sole purpose of criticizing 19th-century attitudes towards women (sexism is bad), she doesn't embarrass herself. The film's fatal flaw is that it comes to a climax in the middle, as the cream of Viennese society thrills to the first performance of Beethoven's breathtaking Ninth Symphony, then limps along to a sentimental and uninspiring end. Beethoven's life did end on a down note — the greatness of his last work, the difficult Grosse Fugue, was unrecognized during his lifetime. But fiction isn't real life, exhibit A being the entirely fictitious Anna. More music and less melodrama would serve audiences better. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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