Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 28, 1995 TAG: 9501310035
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: B12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFF MILLAR THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
This is Beethoven as Keith Moon, trashing hotel rooms.
Beethoven as a one-man supergroup.
Beethoven as Bob Dylan.
Beethoven, who makes bodices heave with his music alone and who can have any woman he wants.
The Beethoven whose body was borne through the streets on a caisson to his state funeral.
``Music is a terrible thing,'' says this Ludwig van (Gary Oldman). ``What does it do?''
Ludwig van then provides his own answer: ``The listener has no choice but to be carried into the mental state of the composer.''
Writer-director Bernard Rose then attempts to show us what that mental state was: anguish, bitterness, paranoia, alienation, despair, all driven by the astonishing irony of Beethoven's existence - for most of his productive years, this god of sound was deaf.
``Immortal Beloved'' is a delicious, guilty pleasure.
It's an often-delirious amalgam of the old-Hollywood template of the tortured-artist movie, the man-overboard giddiness of Ken Russell's musical-genius biographical pictures and Rose's own cheeky claim that his scholarship is just as valid as that of those stuffy old musicologists whose two-volume biographies of Ludwig van aren't nearly as much fun to read as his film is to watch.
Upon Beethoven's death at age 57 in 1827 (during a thunderstorm, of course), there was discovered a letter he wrote in his final days that left all his assets to his ``immortal beloved.''
One of the women in his life, obviously; Beethoven never married. But which?
Rose then sends Beethoven's loyal-past-death secretary, Anton Schindler (Jeroen Krabbe), out to search for this mystery woman.
The candidates include a procession of countesses - Isabella Rossellini and Valeria Golina play two of them - among whom Beethoven grazed in the days when he lived off patronage.
We see his vicious abuse of his sister-in-law. Ludwig van hauls brother Casper's wife, Johanna (Johanna Ter Steege), into court immediately upon widowhood, uses his popularity and influence to have her declared an unfit mother and takes custody of his nephew, Karl (Matthew North and then Marco Hofschneider). He tries to make Karl a genius composer but alienates him.
This is truly the Droogs' Beethoven: a horror-show childhood of abuse by his father, and an abuser himself. He was a tortured guy, and he liked to spread it around.
Beethoven concealed his progressive hearing loss until he could no longer do so. Rose returns again and again to this motif: the figure of a man who could not experience the beauty he created and found in his frustration the fuel of his rage.
Oldman is first-rate in another of his portrayals of real people. He already has played punk rocker Sid Vicious and Lee Harvey Oswald.
In preparation for playing Beethoven, Oldman reportedly asked Rose to recommend a biography. Rose responded, ``Just listen to the music.''
In the end, that's what we do - let it transport us as it must have transported its creator during the pain and blessed relief of its creation.
Please: Junior-high school music teachers, before you take the class to see this, look at the rating.
Immortal Beloved
A Columbia Pictures release playing at the New River Valley Mall in Christiansburg. Rated R.
by CNB