IMMORTAL BELOVED
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1995 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: Columbia's first Famous-Composer
Bio-Mystery since AMADEUS is a speculation about
the real-life mystery of to whom Ludwig van
Beethoven addressed three unsent letters. He
referred to the addressee only as his "Immortal
Beloved." Gary Oldman is a good choice to play the
genius who expresses his emotional torment through
his music. Still somehow the story is less than
compelling. Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4).
Well, to start with, there probably were three major amors in Beethoven's life. And one really was Giulietta Guicciardi; so far the filmmakers got that one right. The other two women were Giulietta's cousin Josephine von Brunsvik, to whom he proposed, and Therese Malfatti, the daughter of one of Beethoven's doctors. The film did show Josephine as a minor diversion and ignored Malfatti altogether. This is a rough biography of Ludwig Van Beethoven that takes some liberties to add some suspense.
There genuinely is a historical mystery, of course. After Beethoven's death three letters were found addressed to someone he called "Immortal Beloved." It is possible they were just a writing exercise, though the fact they range from poetic prose to complaints about his health and his discomfort makes that unlikely. If they were to a real person, nobody ever found out to whom the letters were addressed. The film suggests that Beethoven (here played by Gary Oldman), kept this love a secret, then illogically left a bequest to his "Immortal Beloved" without ever naming the intended recipient. Anton Schindler, a friend (played by Jeroen Krabbe) sets out, to solve the mystery. (The real Anton Schindler apparently was a junior acquaintance of the composer. Beethoven was born in 1770 and Schindler was the author of BIOGRAPHIE VON LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN--English title: BEETHOVEN AS I KNEW HIM--in 1860, some thirty-three years after Beethoven died. But Schindler might well have looked for the mysterious love, so to set up this mystery/biography is really not too much of a conceit. Though it is a bit absurd to assume that the composer would on one hand be so secretive about this love and on the other hand virtually to force this investigation by leaving her his fortune. And, of course, as with AMADEUS, any conclusions the film draws are purely speculation and should be considered as such.
The film opens with Oldman living up to his name and near death. (He looked much the same early in BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA, but there he was near death just on the other side.) Schindler finds the will and sets out with a list of leads to try to discover who this Immortal Beloved is. The structure is like that of CITIZEN KANE and as with CITIZEN KANE the story of the life is revealed as a mosaic of flashbacks and here even flashbacks-within-flashbacks, mostly covering the period from the onset of his deafness to his death. First Schindler visits the now-aging Countess Giulietta Guicciardi (Valeria Golino), whom Beethoven forcefully makes his pupil. She falls in love with him and wants to marry him, but she and her father discover a secret about Beethoven that he cannot bear them to know. The trail then leads to Anna Marie Erdody (Isabella Rossellini), a Hungarian noble who continues the story, and so forth. Much of the film concentrates on either on his women, his deafness, or his cruel battle for custody and control of his nephew.
Gary Oldman is one of the best and most versatile actors in film today. He gives us a very watchable impression of a great genius in constant struggle with himself and with his own personal demons. Krabbe's role is less demanding, calling for him to be little more than a good listener in period clothing. Galino and Rossellini are winning but are upstaged by the intensity of Oldman's performance. In fact the only other strong performance is by Johanna Ter Steege as the sister- in-law who fights Beethoven for custody of her own son. Direction is by Bernard Rose, director of the off-beat fantasy PAPERHOUSE and of the horror film CANDYMAN.
"It is the power of music to carry one into the mental state of the composer," according to Beethoven. And Rose seemingly uses this as the inspiration to score the film with whatever music Beethoven is composing at each point in time. Whether he was entirely accurate is unclear, but he does seem to proceed though the symphonies in chronological order. This means, of course, that the filmmakers get a glorious, evocative orchestral score simply by making selections. And certainly one cannot deny the power of scenes like Napoleon's shelling Vienna to the strains of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony in pure digital sound.
The fragmentation of the narration, using the patchwork narrative form, and bogging down of the story into a custody battle tend to rob IMMORTAL BELOVED of some of its power, but the music on a really good sound system and the crafty proposed solution to the central mystery make this one of the better musical biographies. Rating high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mark.leeper@att.com
.
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