Who's in It: Ed Harris, Diane Kruger
The Basics: You'd think from the title that it was going to be about some guy who walked around pretending to be Beethoven and eventually someone would actually say the title of the movie in the dialogue, or at the very least, Beethoven would go, "Hey, jerk, quit copying me!" But it's just a fake biopic about some woman who never even existed (Kruger) whose job it was(n't) to copy Beethoven's scribbles onto sheet music. And it's about as much fun to watch as transcription.
What's the Deal? If you're going to make an "imagined" movie about a famous person, like Fur, the movie about Diane Arbus that's completely made up, then you should at least put some freaky, interesting characters in it. Fur had fugly nudists, S&M people barking like dogs and Robert Downey Jr. in a werewolf costume. This movie just has the boring transcriptionist and her dumb life problems.
Who Makes the Face of Pain Like Ed Harris? Nobody, That's Who: I apologize now to Harris for making fun of his constipated "tortured artist" facial expressions, but I can't watch him do it without cracking up. And he does it quite a bit here. And I also can't watch it without hearing Marcia Gay Harden's voice from Pollack, yelling at Harris, "You need, Pollack! You need! You need! You need!"
Yes, Women Were Repressed in the 19th Century, But … it just seems weird that there's a thwarted feminism subplot going on here about Kruger's desire to be a composer and that desire being stymied because she's not male. And the movie imposes a modern sense of gender equality on it all that seems really out of place.
Homework: Now that I've mocked him, I will say that it's pretty impressive to see how he actually altered his handwriting to look like Beethoven's and learned how to look like he's really conducting an orchestra. But this movie still sucks.