Ludwig van's not so golden years

BY GENE SEYMOUR | Newsday Staff Writer

November 10, 2006

"Copying Beethoven" wants very badly to lift our creative and spiritual horizons. It's too bad that the movie is so leaden and earthbound. Such strain is perhaps inevitable for any project that tries to distill or evoke the spirit of its eponymous musical giant. But if you're going to tackle Ludwig van Beethoven, you've got to go as hard and high as he did. All this movie does is flounder and flail around his tempestuous spirit.

To probe the enigmatic final years of Beethoven's life, the movie cobbles together a character named Anna Holtz (Diane Kruger), a shy, demure young woman who comes to 1824 Vienna to study composition. Her grades have somehow qualified her to work as a copyist for the deaf, mercurial maestro (Ed Harris) so he can get his Ninth Symphony in shape for its much-anticipated premiere.

Apparently, there was no such person as Anna in what we like to call "real life." She is a composite of different people who worked as transcribers and muses to Beethoven. The movie wishes to convince us that Anna became both a devotee and a critic to her boss. But there's little in either the script or in Kruger's performance that convinces us that she had enough gumption to give as good as she got from Beethoven - or "Lu," to his drinking buddies.

Harris does his customary heroic best to overcome the deficiencies of his project, trying to ground Beethoven's mythic stature by making him something of a wild-eyed sleaze savant. He does more effective gyrations with his body than director Agnieszka Holland does with her cameras.

Someday, maybe someone will find a way to achieve a cinematic depiction of Beethoven that nails down the essence of his solitary genius without contrived narratives. For now, the best place in pop culture to find such a depiction worthy of its subject remains Joni Mitchell's song, "Judgement of the Moon and Stars."