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Copying Beethoven"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.
Struggling with deafness, ill health and the fear that his gift is receding with age, the Pollock star offers another forceful snapshot of the artistic temperament. Co-scripters Stephen J Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson also furnish him with all the best lines, delivered with lip-smacking relish by an actor who knows an ace part when he sees one. ("A woman composer is like a dog walking on its hind legs," he sniggers on learning of Kruger's musical ambitions. "It's never done well, but you're surprised to see it done at all.")
The first performance of Beethoven's 'Ninth' takes pride of place in Holland's film and provides it with its dramatic and musical highpoint. Elsewhere, bathos tends to set in, Kruger's strained relationship with would-be bridge-builder Martin Bauer (Goode) and Ludwig's dealings with his feckless nephew Karl (Joe Anderson, Peter Hook in Ian Curtis movie Control) introducing soap operatics.
What this picture desperately needs is some of the wildly sensual abandon that Ken Russell brought to his famous portraits of Liszt, Elgar, Tchaikovsky and the like. For all Harris's eccentricity and belligerence, Copying Beethoven is just too damn polite.
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