Creative license with composer’s life

“He mooned me,” Anna Holtz (Diane Kruger) confesses to her persnickety engineer boyfriend, Martin Bauer (Matthew Goode), relating another day at the office with her new boss, Ludwig van Beethoven. This disclosure would be disconcerting enough if Beethoven’s death didn’t predate the expression (or at least its current usage) by about 140 years. But according to press notes for Agnieszka Holland’s “Copying Beethoven,” the soulful amanuensis and self-appointed emotional advisor to the great composer is a “fictional character based on actual persons.” So she’s as free to be as anachronistic as she wants to be.

Certainly Holland (“Europa, Europa,” “Olivier, Olivier”), who directed from a script by Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson (“Ali,” “Nixon”) seems intent on bringing a 1980s women’s studies department sensibility to this 19th century tale of tortured artistry and eleventh-hour sensitivity training. And for all its awe at the composer’s mad genius and black hole-like ability to suck the oxygen from a room, the movie belongs to Anna, a girl with a dream in the days before girls were allowed to have them.

The movie is intended as an account of the great composer’s final years, when deafness took his music in radical new directions not immediately understood by his audiences. Profoundly lonely and angry about the cruelty of his condition, Beethoven spent his last few years alone and isolated. According to the film’s producer-screenwriters, “the great challenge in dramatizing the last years of Beethoven’s life is that he really had no one to talk to.” Enter the young, beautiful, worshipful and talented, but not too talented, Anna. She has come to Vienna to study composition at a conservatory and enters Beethoven’s life by way of his publisher Wenzel Schlemmer (Ralph Riach), who has asked the conservatory to send along its brightest student to work as a copyist. In what can only be interpreted as some kind of era-related snafu, the conservatory sends a girl. The poor, abused Schlemmer, whose cancer has at least spared him the agony of having to deal with the talent much longer, dispatches Anna straight into the maw.

When Anna meets Ludwig (Ed Harris), hearing loss has reduced him to wearing a cone-like contraption strapped to his Graydon Carter wig. He’s an intimidating figure, all sturm und drang und ego, but Anna, all of 23, has his number. Presenting him with her first musical transcription, she explains that she’s taken the liberty of correcting a couple of things in advance. She knows he would have changed them eventually, because she “understands his soul.” Naturally, she secretly hopes that he’ll soon understand hers when she gets up the nerve to show him her work. In the meantime, she’s made to suffer remarks like, “A woman’s composing is like a dog walking on its hind legs. It is not done well, but you’re surprised to find it done at all.”

The real Beethoven never said any such thing, of course. But a couple of other people did. Samuel Johnson concocted the quip in honor of female preachers, then Virginia Woolf adapted it to describe the prejudices faced by women artists in “A Room of One’s Own.” In fact, Holland’s copyist recalls the book’s hypothetical Shakespeare’s sister -- only where Woolf imagined a woman prevented from writing by the circumstances of her gender and eventually killing herself, “Copying Beethoven” imagines a girl whose adorably po-faced perseverance wins her the respect and admiration of her hero, who eventually inspires her to dump her fancy prig in order to pursue her dream.

Fine. But hasn’t Ludwig suffered enough? Why drag him into this? It’s not just that the movie plays fast and loose with his biography, inserting a nonexistent soul mate into his last, lonely days -- though this is a new trend, apparently, as evidenced by the new, imaginary biopic of Diane Arbus, “Fur,” in which the unhappy photographer discovers fleeting happiness with a made-up sideshow refugee (Robert Downey Jr. in a Chewbacca costume) -- it reduces Beethoven to a moldy cliche. Harris reprises shades of Jackson Pollock to create a method Ludwig, for whom the creative process is an extended physical effusion. Like a 17th century Russell Crowe, he lumbers, bellows, smashes offensive bad art with a single smack of his cane. He teases the barwench, torments the neighbors and hideously oppresses his nephew Karl (Joe Anderson), a pink-eyed weasel with a gambling problem, whom he claims to adore.

Maybe because the relationship makes very little sense, the characters seem as though they were put there to reflect the other’s feelings. For Anna, Beethoven is a screen on which to project her fantasies. For Ludwig, Anna is a handy ear in which to funnel his loneliness and rage. His reactions are so explosive, in fact, they require rack-zoom reaction shots from Anna, who nonetheless stoically suffers her disappointment in her hero’s social skills and soldiers through the work. When the doorknob-deaf Beethoven (though his hearing impairment appears to be rather mercurial and selective) insists to Schlemmer’s horror on conducting the symphony himself, Anna steps in as ghost conductor. Together, they bring the piece to an ecstatic chorale climax, at which point an earthquake seems to hit the concert hall.

Shot 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.

carina.chocano@latimes.com

*

‘Copying Beethoven’

MPAA rating: Rated PG-13 for some sexual elements

An MGM release. Director Agnieszka Holland. Screenplay Stephen J. Rivele, Christopher Wilkinson. Producers Sidney Kimmel, Michael Taylor, Rivele, Wilkinson. Director of photography Ashley Rowe. Editor Alex Mackie. Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes .

In selected theaters.