"He mooned me," Anna Holtz (Diane Kruger) confesses to her persnickety engineer boyfriend, Martin Bauer (Matthew Goode), relating another day at the mediation with her new boss, Ludwig van Beethoven. This disclosure would be disconcerting enough if Beethoven's extermination didn't predate the pathos (or at least its current usage) by hither 140 years. But according to newspaperwomen notes suited for Agnieszka Holland's "Copying Beethoven," the intense amanuensis and self-appointed zealous advisor to the important composer is a "imaginary sign based on actual persons." So she's as free to be as anachronistic as she wants to be.
Certainly Holland ("Europa, Europa," "Olivier, Olivier"), who directed from a script by Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson ("Ali," "Nixon") seems intent on bringing a 1980s women's studies reckon on sensibility to this 19th century record of tortured artistry and eleventh-hour compassion training. And also in behalf of all its awe at the composer's mad genius and iniquitous hole-like ability to suck the oxygen from a stay, the motion picture belongs to Anna, a girl with a dream in the days before girls were allowed to have them.
The movie is intended as an account of the great composer's irrefutable years, when deafness took his music in principal trendy directions not immediately understood by his audiences. Deeply reclusive and irate more the cruelty of his inure, Beethoven expended his last few years matchless and isolated. According to the film's maker-screenwriters, "the great brave in dramatizing the pattern years of Beethoven's life is that he in point of fact had no chestnut to talk to." Enter the little ones, beautiful, worshipful and talented, but not
too
talented, Anna. She has get possession of to Vienna to study composition at a conservatory and enters Beethoven's life by situation incidentally of his publisher Wenzel Schlemmer (Ralph Riach), who has asked the conservatory to send along its brightest schoolchild to knead as a copyist. In what can only be interpreted as some thoughtful of epoch-related snafu, the conservatory sends a girl. The slipshod, hurt Schlemmer, whose cancer has at least spared him the agony of having to distribute with the faculty much longer, dispatches Anna straight into the maw.
When Anna meets Ludwig (Ed Harris), hearing erosion has reduced him to wearing a cone-like device strapped to his Graydon Carter wig. He's an intimidating force, all
sturm und drang und
ego, but Anna, all of 23, has his number. Presenting him with her first musical transcription, she explains that she's entranced the leave of correcting a couple of things in advance. She knows he would have changed them in the course of time, because she "understands his soul." Really, she secretly hopes that he'll soon understand hers when she gets up the doughtiness to show him her masterpiece. In the meantime, she's made to suffer remarks strain, "A woman's composing is adore a dog walking on its hind legs. It is not done doubtlessly, but you're surprised to find it done at all."
The real Beethoven never said any such thing, of course. But a span of other people did. Samuel Johnson concocted the crack wise in honor of female preachers, then Virginia Woolf adapted it to outline the prejudices faced by women artists in "A Room of One's Own." In fact, Holland's copyist recalls the book's hypothetical Shakespeare's sister — only where Woolf imagined a woman prevented from criticism by the circumstances of her gender and eventually fatiguing herself, "Copying Beethoven" imagines a piece whose adorably po-faced grit wins her the respect and admiration of her exemplar, who eventually inspires her to throw her make-believe prig in order to aspire to her dream.
Amerce. But hasn't Ludwig suffered enough? Why slog him into this? It's not just that the movie plays fast and loose with his biography, inserting a nonexistent soul mate into his last, barren days — though this is a redesigned trend, apparently, as evidenced by the unfamiliar, imaginary biopic of Diane Arbus, "Fur," in which the unhappy photographer discovers fleeting joy with a made-up sideshow refugee (Robert Downey Jr. in a Chewbacca costume) — it reduces Beethoven to a moldy cliché. Harris reprises shades of Jackson Pollock to spawn a method Ludwig, concerning whom the inventive process is an extended diplomate effusion. Like a 17th century Russell Crowe, he lumbers, bellows, smashes offensive bad art with a apart smack of his cane. He teases the barwench, torments the neighbors and hideously oppresses his nephew Karl (Joe Anderson), a pink-eyed weasel with a gambling problem, whom he claims to be in love with.
Maybe because the relationship makes very little sense, the characters seem as though they were a notch there to over the other's feelings. For Anna, Beethoven is a screen on which to project her fantasies. For Ludwig, Anna is a handy consideration in which to funnel his loneliness and rage. His reactions are so ugly, in fact, they ask for rack-zoom revenge shots from Anna, who nonetheless stoically suffers her disappointment in her hero's community skills and soldiers through the work. When the doorknob-unconcerned Beethoven (though his hearing impairment appears to be rather mercurial and selective) insists to Schlemmer's horror on conducting the symphony himself, Anna steps in as ghost conductor. Together, they reintroduce the piece to an ecstatic chorale climax, at which point an earthquake seems to hit the concert classroom.
Shot by Ashley Rowe to look like a grumpy between a Vermeer retrospective and a music video, "Copying Beethoven" is silly and erroneous, if reasonably entertaining for the purpose its charming lack of self-awareness, its fondness repayment for lines akin to "Loneliness is my doctrine!" and its transcendently beautiful music.
carina.chocano@latimes.com
*
'Copying Beethoven'
MPAA rating:
Rated PG-13 for some sexual elements
An MGM come out with. Director Agnieszka Holland. Screenplay Stephen J. Rivele, Christopher Wilkinson. Producers Sidney Kimmel, Michael Taylor, Rivele, Wilkinson. Director of photography Ashley Rowe. Rewrite man Alex Mackie. Constant heretofore: 1 hour, 43 minutes .
In selected theaters.