Cinematical

When a writer/director decides to do battle with the studios, the loser is always us. That’s what happened to Bernard Rose, a truly brilliant filmmaker who stormed out of the gate in the early 90s with two masterpieces in a row: the terrifying gothic horror film Candyman, about a modern-day Chicago slum haunted by the ghost of a 19^th century slave, and Immortal Beloved, the definitive screen biography of Ludwig Van Beethoven. (By the way, fans of Candyman knew that Virginia Madsen could act long before Sideways.)

Rose had a ‘reputation’ from the beginning, reportedly signing on to direct Candyman and then raising hell with the studio in order to basically shoot what he wanted. Immortal Beloved is literate and snobbish enough that one can imagine the suits checking with lawyers to make sure they got what they paid for. It was on his next studio project, though, a big-budget adaptation of Anna Karenina with Braveheart’s Sophie Marceau, that everything went kablooey. Rose, fresh off the acclaim of Immortal Beloved, refused to hear concerns from executive toffs about his adaptation of the 1,000-page novel, and the film was ultimately taken from him and dramatically re-fashioned in post.

After that fiasco, he pinwheeled off into one of those weird corners of the cinema universe where he could make no-budget "personal" films and do endless interviews. His favorite hobby these days seems to be wishing bankruptcy and locusts on the studios that will no longer employ him. It’s truly a shame, because if things had gone another way, he would certainly be one of those few directors whose next film is always eagerly awaited. He’s quite a visionary, with shades of Kubrick and Lean, and qualities all his own.

His entry in the Composer Biography genre is like all others in one way - it's off-center. For some reason, composer movies are never straight-forward and always feel compelled to bang the heightened-reality drum in order to not be outdone by the power of the music they are trumpeting. Witness Milos Forman’s Amadeus, which was adapted from a Pushkin story and makes no claim to authenticity, or The Music Lovers, which is so outside the circle that Roger Ebert dismissed it as a "private fantasy."

There are two "angles" that Rose uses to give Immortal Beloved its own special composer biography kick, and each is intriguing. The first involves the mystery of Beethoven’s unsterbliche Geliebte, which I don’t have room to explain to the uninitiated. The identity of the immortal beloved has been long-established through detective work. Beethoven’s definitive biographer spent years tracking the movements of a prime suspect, and in dramatic fashion, produced documentation showing that she had shown up in exactly the same place at exactly the same time as the ‘immortal’ was known to have. End of story. Rose promptly poops all over this. His solution to the mystery is the biggest flapdoodle of all time. No biographer in 200 years has agreed.

The second angle Rose uses is an ingenious solution for filling in the gaps in Beethoven’s life. A life lived so long ago is obviously not recounted by the day, so some kind of fiction is necessary. What Rose does here is so subtle and wonderful that it flew over the heads of most critics on the film's release. Some of the ‘fictional’ scenes in the film are interpretations of period literature. There’s an extended scene taken directly from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, as well as one from Tolstoy’s story The Kreutzer Sonata. You can feel shades of other literary pieces sneaking in here and there throughout the story. It’s a way of giving sonorous life to the great books of the period.

But film is about seeing more than hearing, and this film surfeits with great imagery. Beethoven resting his head on the Broadwood Grand, in order to feel the vibrations of the music ringing in his deaf ears. The frantic re-writing of Eroica after Napoleon’s shocking betrayal of Austria. Beethoven lying in the street, covered with piss, in between arrests for vagrancy. The gorgeous opening shots of the rabble waiting outside the funeral hall to get a glimpse of his casket, overlaid with the great funeral oration by the poet Franz Grillpartzer. He was an artist, and who will stand beside him...

This movie has some of my favorite casting of all time, especially in the central role of Johanna. Rose cast a striking-looking Dutch actress named Johanna ter Steege, also known for her role in The Vanishing. She’s not a traditional beauty, and what she’s doing in this movie is a wild and perplexing question. As a Kubrick fan, I happen to know that she was also cast in the lead role of that great, lost project, Aryan Papers, which is even more wild to think about, especially when you’ve read the book. What a horrible world we live in where that film was never made.

And of course I have to mention Gary Oldman himself, probably the best working actor today. The new Nicholson, he is a master conductor of his own body, able to twist himself down into mousy little perverts like Lee Oswald, or blow himself up into garish testosterone spectacles like Dracula. As Beethoven, we believe every syllable and feel his frustration with Schindler, the factotem, Karl, his mediocre nephew, and everyone else who refuses to make his life easier. (Jeroen Krabbe’ does his best work here, as does Isabella Rossellini as the Countess Erdody.)

Too often, every detail in a movie is accurate except for the actors using abrasive 20^th-century slang and anachronistic customs. Immortal Beloved succeeds because it tries to make us feel like we’re living in tune with these characters. This is a movie about a time when people believed that complicated political and emotional ideas could be carried on music; an ambition that’s unrecognizable in today’s world. In order to take us into that mental state, no step can be false, lest the whole thing be ruined. Rose doesn’t let the audience down. Here’s hoping that he can find some way back into the system, so he can turn it on its ear once more.