If ever there were a movie to do so, "Copying Beethoven" might actually justify two separate reviews. On one hand, the movie is a visually stunning, enormously powerful visitation of the brilliance of Beethoven's music. Yet at the same time, it's an acutely boring, poorly written and bombastically directed mess of a film that leaves you feeling ripped off and toyed with, like a kid who just lost his dollar to a man wearing a funny hat behind a booth at the fair.
In the course of directing a movie about the creation of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, director Agnieszka Holland must have gotten jealous and decided she wanted to create a symphony herself - but as a movie. When you pair this directorial vanity with the writing tastes of Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson (both of whom worked on heavy biopics like 1995's "Nixon" and 2001's "Ali"), every line, every scene, every moment - just like the notes in a symphony - is of complete importance.
Unfortunately, being over-the-top is easier to avoid and more tolerable to hear when you're listening to a multi-tiered orchestra. When it comes in movie form, it just feels naked and exploitative.
This movie takes place in Vienna and mainly concerns Ludwig van Beethoven (played by Ed Harris) as he wrote his Ninth Symphony, arguably his best work and often seen as one of the most significant pieces of art - not just in music, but of any form - of all time. Unfortunately, this aspect of the movie shares screen time with the romantic side of "Copying Beethoven," in which a gifted and - surprise! - gorgeous female copyist comes to help the almost totally deaf Beethoven commit his notes to paper (Even 19th century Vienna has a little Hollywood in it).
This copyist and aspiring composer, Anna, is played by Diane Kruger, whom you might remember for her role as Helen of Troy in
"Troy" (2004). As in that movie, she's a bad actress with a pretty face, which is fine for a movie like "Troy." But shouldn't we expect something more from a movie about Beethoven? Was there really not some less-well-known, less-good-looking actress available, one who could have actually given emotional weight to the film?
As Beethoven and Anna spar musically with each other, he begins to develop a respect for Anna's skills as a composer, though he can't fully escape the sexism of his time. Throughout the movie, Anna gives suggestions to different parts of Beethoven's Ninth, and he listens to many of them. Anna, we learn, is in a serious relationship with an engineer named Martin (Matthew Goode), though we never really get to see deeply into that aspect of her life.
So, for the most part, Anna's relationship with Beethoven stays platonic, except for one bizarre scene in which the composer is taking a sponge bath and Anna takes it upon herself to wash his chest as he sits and moans. This scene came out of nowhere, particularly for a movie that deals with the idiocy of sexism, and quite frankly, it's a little unsettling. For the entirety of the movie, Anna's character looks up to Beethoven with intense admiration and respect. So when she washes his graying, aging body, it feels a little forced, and, in a sense, perverse.
There are moments here and there in "Copying Beethoven," though, that are spectacular. Beethoven's performance of his Ninth Symphony, for instance, is a powerful scene and very well done directorially - and there's a neat twist to his conducting that is historically inaccurate but still entertaining.
The start of the film portrays an interesting montage of peasants' faces while one of Beethoven's more avant-garde symphonies plays in the background. But all of these powerful scenes and others like it exist only because of Beethoven; no other character in the movie is the cause of anything worth mentioning in the film. "Copying Beethoven" suffers because it is not solely about Beethoven, and by the end, everything else in the movie was a nuisance, particularly Anna.
To that extent, maybe what's most disappointing, distracting and idiotic about Anna's role in the film is not so much that it's a depiction of what is wrong with Hollywood's expectations that every film must have a love interest, but that you feel "Copying Beethoven" could have actually been a really good movie if the writers had let it be.
Kruger's acting did a pretty significant disservice to an interesting story: Beethoven, who is by this time almost completely deaf, feels helpless and frustrated as he tries to work under those conditions, and Anna, as a woman, feels a similar frustration because she is not taken seriously as a female composer in a male-dominated society.
See, now that's interesting. And when you mix that with absolutely beautiful music, you have a cinematic success. But "Copying Beethoven" never gets there, because it's too caught up in trying to be something it should never have been.
