The maiden and the maestro

In the movies, the life of the mind often turns to mush and stories about genius tend to be painfully dumb. Film seems to have such a firm hold on exterior reality that the inner world of creation is simply too mysterious and elusive for commercial stories that depend on objects and actions, too obscure for a medium that depends on light. And so most filmmakers give us painters slashing away at canvases with grim determination and writers nibbling on pens that might as well be magic wands, pantomimes of inspiration spiked with the usual flavorings of perversion, despair, alienation and tragedy.

At first glance the period film Copying Beethoven looks as if it might be following a familiar course. To begin with, there is Ed Harris in a Beethoven wig. It's a fine wig, but wigs are generally worrisome, particularly when atop a head that seems quintessentially modern American. Then there is the matter of the young German actress Diane Kruger, who had the misfortune to play Helen in Wolfgang Petersen's Troy and looks too beautiful to play a role of any substance. That, at least, is one lesson imparted by Hollywood, where, as around the 12th century BC, attractive women are often little more than prizes to be passed around onscreen. Happily, the film director Agnieszka Holland, whose previous features include Europa, Europa, is herself a woman of substance.

Copying Beethoven takes place in 1824, toward the end of Beethoven's life. Kruger plays Anna Holtz, a Viennese music student who through talent, ambition and happenstance finds herself summoned to transcribe Beethoven's messy musical notations. Stone deaf, Beethoven initially rebuffs her services (you're a woman, he all but shouts, as if her sex were a crime), but quickly relents. Time and life are running out, and he is too preoccupied with finishing his latest symphony to rout out someone new. So together, in a darkly lighted apartment where rats scuttle underfoot amid eggshells and overflowing chamber pots, he composes and she copies. In time, the work and the notes join forces until one evening, with Beethoven conducting, the Ninth Symphony erupts into a dazzled world.

The presentation of the Ninth is reason alone to see the film. Onscreen is the Kecskemet Symphony Orchestra of Hungary, but what we hear is a 1996 Decca recording of Bernard Haitink conducting the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam. Purists may object to this strategy, but Holland's filmmaking in this scene is so sensitive that only quibblers will notice if the bowing doesn't match the sound. With her cinematographer, Ashley Rowe, and editor, Alex Mackie, she orchestrates bursts of images and metronomic camera pans that become a visual counterpoint to the music's propulsive and flowing tempos, its rushing violins and soaring voices. Every so often the camera focuses on one of Beethoven's hands, the fingertips stirring the air as if rustling the notes. The world falls away, blissfully.

The screenwriter Stephen Rivele, who wrote Copying Beethoven with Christopher Wilkinson (their other credits include Nixon and Ali), has explained that the idea for the film originated with Anthony Hopkins, who subsequently opted not to take the role. Harris, an actor who can show the storms gathering under a character's skin, proves an ideal substitute. Topped with that messy salt-and-pepper wig that frames and obscures his scowling, searching face, he invests Beethoven with a violent turbulence that sometimes floods the room but mostly stays coiled inside, where it seethes. (Even his darkened eyebrows look furious.) This isn't the narcissistic rage of movie-made genius, but the private agonies of a man who lives very much alone in his head.