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80Copying Beethoven has an ace up its sleeve: the wonder and drama of the Ninth Symphony itself (heard here in Bernard Haitink's tremendous 1996 recording with the Royal Concertgebouw).
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80Topped with that messy salt-and-pepper wig that frames and obscures his scowling, searching face, [Harris] invests Beethoven with a violent turbulence that sometimes floods the room but mostly stays coiled inside, where it seethes.
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80The movie is completely beguiling, and it delivers joy, the beautiful spark of the gods.
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75Copying Beethoven, at its best, is a sort of grand cinema opera of the composer's life and music.
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75Has one knockout sequence: the deaf maestro conducting his Ninth Symphony as Anna coaches from the wings. It goes on for what seems a whole reel, but it's so sublime it seems too short and, by itself, could stand as one of the greatest classic music videos ever.
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70Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa, The Secret Garden) directs with obvious feeling rather than cynicism, and I was swept away by it despite the story's anachronisms.
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63There are two reasons to see - and hear - Agnieszka Holland's Copying Beethoven. One is Ed Harris' performance as the nearly deaf and totally egocentric Ludwig van; the other is a cherry-picked 10-minute chunk of the composer's soaring Ninth Symphony.
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63Like an old college wrestler, Harris saunters through this toasty little piece of biographical fiction in love with the part's fixins'.
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63This is one of those middle-of-the-road art pictures that will impress some music lovers and attract a small audience, but won't really excite anyone. Copying Beethoven does not do for its title composer what Amadeus did for Mozart, and that's a shame.
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Screenwriters Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson, best known for the two ponderous biopics "Ali" and "Nixon," deliver a film awkwardly composed.
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60Shot by Ashley Rowe to look like a cross between a Vermeer retrospective and a music video, Copying Beethoven is silly and misguided, if reasonably entertaining for its charming lack of self-awareness, its weakness for lines like "Loneliness is my religion!" and its transcendently beautiful music.
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60We are left finally with a double response: it is hard to know exactly why the film was made, what its emotional and thematic point is, yet we are glad it happened because of Harris's performance.
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50The picture never successfully comes off the written page.
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50Harris' impressive channeling of Ludwig is diluted by the decision of screenwriters Stephen Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson to put the copyist front and center, possibly to distinguish their feature from "Immortal Beloved."
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50More music and less melodrama would serve audiences better.
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50One is left yearning for the overheated melodrama of Bernard Rose's 1994 Beethoven biopic, "Immortal Beloved," which was trashy, but fun.
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50Helmer Agnieszka Holland's Copying Beethoven joins 1994's "Immortal Beloved" in the ranks of mediocre dramatic interpretations of Beethoven's biography.
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50Aspires to the sublime, but it stalls at the merely ridiculous.
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38Harris can be a brilliant actor, and there are flashes of that here. But he's done in by a script that lacks any subtlety.
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33Holland's empurpled bio-fantasy is hooey with an anachronistic feminist slant from start to finish.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 10 out of 13
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Mixed: 0 out of 13
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Negative: 3 out of 13
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PaulW.1
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MichaelE8Captures the essence of Beethoven along with a stirring performance of his ninth symphony.
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Williamw.9Excellent story. Performance of the ninth was magnificent.