Copying Beethoven Again

[Michael]

I thought this movie had run its course, but I see a large (half-page) advertisement in this week's Radio Times: "In Cinemas from August 17th". It must be nearly a year since it was released in America (or is my memory playing tricks on me?). I have never seen such a delay between a U.S. and British release before. I wonder if it will play in cinemas in Ireland?
I also notice from Play.com that the Region 2 DVD will be available shortly.

[Peter]

Thanks for that Michael - I'll look out for that.

[Chris]

I thought this movie had run its course, but I see a large (half-page) advertisement in this week's Radio Times: "In Cinemas from August 17th". It must be nearly a year since it was released in America (or is my memory playing tricks on me?). I have never seen such a delay between a U.S. and British release before. I wonder if it will play in cinemas in Ireland?
I also notice from Play.com that the Region 2 DVD will be available shortly.

I think it came out here last November.

[Joy]

It did come out in November here. November 9th to be exact is when I saw it in Scottsdale. I also have the DVD now. I don't know why it took so long to get to Britain.

[terry]

It did come out in November here. November 9th to be exact is when I saw it in Scottsdale. I also have the DVD now. I don't know why it took so long to get to Britain.

In fact it is rather strange. Better late than nevere. Please send us addresses of sites/newspapers etc. who speak about it.

[Maurice Colgan]

"Copying Beethoven" ads in the UK Radio Times and The Irish Times. Movie to be released at selected cinemas 17th August.

http://irelandtoo.blogspot.com

[Peter]

Unfortunately the film has received poor reviews in its opening week in the British press - Ed Harris is the only one to come out of it well - here is a sample:


GUARDIAN

A fatuous, bafflingly imagined tale of the unhappy and unwell Beethoven and his ordeal in preparing the Ninth Symphony for its premiere. It is served up as a sort of platonic love affair: the stormy friendship between Beethoven (a bewigged Ed Harris) and his brilliant, beautiful, but entirely fictional young amanuensis and copyist Anna Holtz (Diane Kruger).
The chemistry supposedly fizzes and the sparks allegedly fly; the sassy young woman talks back to the grumpy old maestro who naturally comes to rely on her. The style has been pinched from Milos Forman's Amadeus: but the speculation about Mozart's relationship with Salieri was at least based on real people. "Anna Holtz" is entirely made up. So what's the point?

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OBSERVER


Directed by expatriate Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, Copying Beethoven is a disappointingly conventional biopic in the romantic manner of such Hollywood films as A Song to Remember (Cornel Wilde as Chopin) and Song Without End (Dirk Bogarde as Liszt), but less funny, and altogether lacking the grandeur and insight of Amadeus or Tony Palmer's Wagner.

The movie concentrates especially on the four hectic days in 1824 before the premiere of the ninth symphony. A young, fictional Hungarian musician, Anna Holtz (a pretty, but ineffectual Diane Kruger) is brought in as a copyist to help the deaf, irascible Beethoven (Ed Harris) get his act together, as they used to say in Old Vienna. They also say things like: 'I'm not a bad person' (the composer's nephew Karl), and Beethoven compares a woman composing to a dog walking on its hind legs, suggesting either that he's read Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson or that great minds joke alike.

The film bombards us with platitudinous and pseudo-profound statements about art and the soul. Harris, making strenuous efforts to convey Beethoven's contradictions and complexity, looks right, though from certain angles he has a disconcerting resemblance to Adam Faith. He is, however, forced into such situations as baring his bum to affront Anna (a reference to his Mooning Sonata?), and when he forces an entry into the convent where Anna resides to woo her back, you expect her aunt, the understanding mother superior (Phyllida Law), to break into a chorus of 'What do you call a problem like Beethoven?'


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TIMES

“I’m a very difficult person,” Ludwig Van Beethoven (Harris) tells his latest copyist, Anna Holtz (Kruger), though she has gathered that much already. “I take comfort in the fact that God made me that way.” Indeed, while the Lord looms large in his thoughts, Beethoven is no saint. He rails, bullies and barks, riding roughshod over everyone.

Although it plays fast with the facts (the proto-feminist Anna is pure invention), Holland’s film succeeds better than most. Harris carries the day with a grand, even joltingly theatrical performance predicated on the maestro’s Jekyll and Hyde mood swings and enormous self-belief. In a lengthy sequence devoted to the first performance of the Ninth Symphony, the movie is startlingly effective.

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TELEGRAPH

When writing this good can meet with indifference from the hand that feeds, it's all the more galling to see a dog of a script being thrown filet mignon. The glossy Euro-production Copying Beethoven barks, rolls over, and plays dead for two hours. It is a great example of that time-honoured genre, the biopic so silly it plays like a spoof.

Try this: "My God, Beethoven, you're even deafer than I thought!" says someone about one of the late string quartets.

Or this: "Beethoven mooned me!" complains his put-upon female copyist, Anna Holtz (Diane Kruger). You won't struggle to guess which sonata he was miming.

Incredibly, it isn't a comedy. It is serious tosh. If ham could leap off the deli counter and attack your face, it might take the shape of Ed Harris, whose quivering, outraged paroxysms make it no small wonder his wig doesn't fly off.

Agnieszka Holland's film has precisely one promising sequence, when Beethoven, entirely deaf but determined to conduct his own première, installs Anna in the orchestra to help him beat time.

But even that goes awry when the camera operator gets a bizarre fit of the shakes. If we're being charitable, it's because he or she has been instructed to capture the ecstasy of the Ninth Symphony's finale, but I think it much more likely they've just caught a load of the death-bed scene.

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Channel 4 film



"God infects my mind with music!" cries Ed Harris's volatile Beethoven in Agnieszka Holland's sumptuously staged but dramatically inert costume drama. "He whispers into the ears of some men, but he shouts into mine!" Unfortunately, there is not much chance of Ludwig's mercurial genius infecting this fanciful extrapolation of his winter years, which sees the real-life German legend reluctantly employ a fictional female assistant to prepare duplicates of his momentous 'Ninth Symphony'.

Saddling the plot with such a patently implausible, historically preposterous character isn't quite the liability one might expect. Diane Kruger brings an elegance and conviction to her role that enables us to accept earnest copyist Anna Holtz at face value. More damaging is the movie's torpid pacing and feminist subtext, an anachronistic and intrusive embellishment that inevitably moves the focus away from where it should rightfully be.

That proper focus is Ludwig himself, imposingly brought to life by Harris in a dynamic, uninhibited portrayal that, in a better work than this, would almost certainly guarantee an Oscar nomination.

No amount of grandstanding from Harris can animate this turgid mishmash of musical biopic and May-December romance.

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BBC

A great soundtrack is drowned out by a lot of tedious harping on between Diane Kruger and Ed Harris in Copying Beethoven. She is Anna Holtz, a strong-willed student of composition who'll put up with any amount of bad behaviour just to sit at the feet of "the maestro" Ludwig van Beethoven. Unfortunately for director Agnieszka Holland, a flimsy script means this war of attrition - and yes, the gradual flowering of platonic love - quickly begins to wear thin.

Holtz is a fictional character, hazy as the ether she was pulled from. Being an ardent fan of Beethoven, she offers to transcribe his music and occasionally throws in a little flourish of her own. Naturally this doesn't sit too well with the maestro, and the clash is intensified because she is accustomed to the hushed halls of a convent and he insists on stomping around his apartment blaspheming, boozing and baring his buttocks. Holtz's tight-lipped perseverance just doesn't resonate because we have no sense of why music means so much to her.

Meanwhile, Beethoven struggles with the loss of his hearing, but there are few moments of quiet introspection for Harris. He insists that greatness lies in "the silence between the notes" and plays the obnoxious genius at full volume for almost the entire duration. At least writers Stephen J Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson give him a few witty retorts, and there is one memorable, very long-running scene that nicely illustrates the growing intimacy between Holtz and Beethoven. Together they conduct an orchestra in a performance of the Ninth Symphony (perhaps Beethoven's most rousing number) and as limbs flail and sweat streams, their affection for each other is clear. It's just a shame the rest of the film lacks that touch of inspiration, and ultimately fails to strike a chord.

[Michael]

Peter, after all those reviews I don't know how you can approach this film with an open mind. If you were on a jury, you would be disqualified. Honestly, it's not that bad.

[Tony John Hearne]

I haven't seen the film yet but will Just pondering ..... whatever the reviews, if the film gets the music and passion of LVB into otherwise naive young minds hitherto not exposed to such mastery, it can't be all bad

[Peter]

Peter, after all those reviews I don't know how you can approach this film with an open mind. If you were on a jury, you would be disqualified. Honestly, it's not that bad.

I shall probably see the film next week (after all these years of discussion on this site!) and believe me I am approaching it with an open mind - the reviews reflect my own concerns, but I am prepared to accept some factual distortions (we had them in Amadeus after all) provided the film succeeds in its own right as a drama.

[gardibolt]

It's pretty awful, though. Immortal Beloved, which plays faster and looser with the facts even than Copying Beethoven, is a much better movie (though Harris does acquit himself well).

[jak]

Hey,

New here. Liked both movies, but if it has Beethoven, I usually like it just for the subject matter, including Beethoven Lives Upstairs

Harris was the better Beethoven (than Oldman, imo). Copying was a bit of historical fantasy, but entertaining.

[terry]

Thank you very much Peter, for having written all these reviews so I (we) don't have to search them on the web! Btw, how is your personal review, if you have finally watched it?

PS may I ask a question to Americans here? At the tv there is the series "FAME" that I love since I was a girl: please, what does exactly mean the sentence "come what may?" Something like "let things go as they have to" or something similar? I can't translate exactly in Italian bc it has no sense. Thank you!

[jak]

terry,

"come what may"

-- whatever happens
-- as fate allows
-- unforeseen circumstance

... something like those, anyway.


Fame! I want to live forever,
I want to learn how to fly ...

[Peter]

Thank you very much Peter, for having written all these reviews so I (we) don't have to search them on the web! Btw, how is your personal review, if you have finally watched it?

I still haven't seen it because it hasn't appeared yet at my local cinema, so I'm afraid I can't offer a personal opinion - in fact it seems to have been removed from all cinema listings!