Playing Beethoven: ''Scary'' but good
Posted 2006. 11. 13. 12:36+ http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/entertainment/15979279.htm
By Steven Rea
Inquirer Columnist
With a wig, a girth, and a glint in his eye, Ed Harris - the square-jawed American actor associated with astronauts (The Right Stuff) and stoic Joes, both good, bad and imaginary (Places in the Heart, A History of Violence, A Beautiful Mind) - dives into the part of Ludwig van Beethoven.
In Agnieszka Holland's Copying Beethoven, produced by Philadelphia clothing magnate-turned-film honcho Sidney Kimmel, Harris portrays the German composer as he struggles with deafness, bad hygiene, and the early drafts of his Ninth Symphony.
"When Agnieszka called and asked if I wanted to play Beethoven, I said, 'Me? Beethoven?' " says Harris, who had worked with Holland before - in the religiously themed dramas To Kill a Priest and The Third Miracle.
"I was surprised that she thought I could do this... . The idea was strange and scary. But it's a great story, and it's always good, as an actor, to go places that scare you."
Harris, 55, has gone there before. In the 2005 release Winter Passing, he played a famous, and famously self-destructive, writer. In Pollock, which Harris directed - and for which he landed a best-actor Oscar nomination in 2001 - he played the dangerously unhinged genius painter Jackson Pollock.
"There's something fascinating there, about an artist who is so wholly committed to his work that he rejects, or destroys, his friendships and family," says Harris, who stopped in town recently. "I'm not like that. I'm married, I have a daughter, and I've tried to balance my work with my family. But a role like this gives me a chance to explore that mind-set, that overwhelming, obsessive urge."
As tormented artists go, though, Harris thinks Beethoven had his act together.
"The difference between Beethoven and Pollock is that Pollock's work deteriorated in the last years of his life - his alcoholism, his psychological problems. Beethoven fought through his illnesses, his isolation, to put his music out there till the day he died."
Copying Beethoven, which opened Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse and Ritz Sixteen/NJ, offers a fictional account of the composer's relationship, in his last years, with a young and beautiful music copyist sent to transcribe his sprawling notations. Diane Kruger plays Anna Holtz, the girl, a music student and budding composer.
The film isn't a love story. It's an imagining of how the wild, woolly Beethoven, who believed he was channeling inspiration directly from God, was tamed, and tended to, by a boldly independent woman with her own creative aspirations.
The film's centerpiece scene is the premiere performance of the Ninth, which Beethoven insists on conducting, despite the fact that he cannot hear. Kruger, hunched down between the strings and the brass, signals the changes, the beats and the conducting cues to her mentor on the podium.
"That was a very involved sequence to shoot: a full orchestra, a confined space," recalls Harris, who says that Kruger and he had real chemistry. "One of the things she does is listen - there are some beautiful moments when she's just listening to him, paying attention to him... . A lot of actors don't listen very well."
Harris, who is married to the actress Amy Madigan, is in New York through next Sunday, starring, solo, in Neil LaBute'sWrecks at the Public Theater. Film-wise, Harris appears in Ben Affleck's directing debut, Gone, Baby, Gone, a Boston kidnapping caper based on the Dennis Lehane book. It comes out in the spring.
And Harris hopes to get back into the director's chair himself. He has the rights to Robert B. Parker's western, Appaloosa, and a screenplay in hand. Viggo Mortensen and Diane Lane - who costarred in the hippie-era romance A Walk on the Moon - have committed to the project.
"I love my job," says Harris, who in a moment of nostalgia recalled the very first gig he got in front of a camera: a part in the short-lived 1976 TV series Gibbsville.
"I had no money. I was living for free in a garage and working with a small theater company and painting houses. I remember driving home after I got the word - in my crummy VW station wagon - and I remember crying. I was crying for joy."
Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" chorus was not playing on the car radio.
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