Copying Beethoven

Copying Beethoven is a film I hadn't heard of, although I maybe should have. In skimming along the boxes in the video store, I came across the DVD and thought hey maybe. When I began watching it, I still wasn't sure about how I felt about it until I was caught up in the richness of the period, the way it brought to life Ludwig van Beethoven's world. I loved it even with its flaws-- and it has flaws.

The story is not historically accurate but to me that's not a flaw (although it would probably be for Beethoven purists). The things Beethoven (Ed Harris) said, his personality, the music that he created and why he did what he did, that seemed fairly accurate as best it's known it nearly two hundred years later. Because of Beethoven's deafness, he created extensive journals. When he had a conversation, he often asked the other person to write their side of it; so there are those journals to give insights into his creative genius.

There was no Anna Holz (Diane Kruger) as in one person but many of the things she did in helping Beethoven were true but combined from many people. Anna is a young woman who wants to create music but is the wrong sex for the era in which she was born. She receives a job to copy the music Beethoven wrote, leading to a personal relationship with the maestro but not a sexual one.

Some of the criticism of this film is about it not exactly following what happened with a beloved figure. People need to get over that. Movies tell a story, illustrate a point, bring to life a concept. This movie is about creativity. The story is a vehicle. In this case, the story was flawed some by its editing, which could have been fixed but for some reason was not. It didn't ruin it for me.

And I can't ignore Ed Harris's performance. Was he ever so beautiful? So manly? So intensely interesting? I guess he was because I always like him in anything, but he became this composer, this flawed man who saw music as a conversation with God. Putting a prosthetic nose on Harris to more capture Beethoven's nose, turned him leading man handsome. I kept trying to decide why it was him and yet wasn't and only found out later about the nose.

The story is about music but more than that about the soul, about the creative spirit. The things it says about creativity are true of any sort of creative work for the flow, the need for passion as a part of the whole. Paul Cezanne said it well-- "A work of art that did not begin in emotion is not art." Beethoven had no shortage of passion and neither does Copying Beethoven.