hand-gnawingly awful

This is a ludicrously bad film... that it was made by the talented Agnieszka Holland, is really shocking. The actors do their best with a risable script - why invent such an implausible tale when the reality of Beethoven's life was so much more extraordinary and colourful? These kind of films do so much to damage public perceptions of how 'classical' music is created and prepared for performance... the reality of the first performance of Beethoven's 9th would have been an underprepared and frankly bewildered bunch of musicians tackling a technically difficult and radical new work - here, we heard a slick contemporary performance played by musicians who knew the work inside out. The list of other historical and musical inaccuracies would explode the confines of a humble review here... and the embarrassing 'artistic' gobbledigook that the film's writers put in poor Beethoven's mouth - I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

I knew in advance that the film was going to be bad, these type of things almost always are - but it wasn't even as unintentionally funny as I'd hoped. More disturbing - there are clearly people out there who actually took it seriously and think that they've gained 'insights' into the life and work of one of music's greatest and most original masters... I'm scared.