I seem to have a week spot in my head for movies dealing with the life and music of Ludwig Van Beethoven (not, I would hasten to add, for movies starring St. Bernard's dogs). If nothing else, I will say that you are pretty much assured of having a good soundtrack. Not having learned my lesson from the transcendent piffle of such films as "immortal Beloved" and that one with Ed Harris playing Beethoven, the name of which escapes me at the moment, I got sucked into this rather silly film. What this movie does well; Christopher Walken. He gives the film any of the weight it has, from reading from T.S. Eliot, to giving a cracking (and plausible) anecdote about Pablo Casals. He inhabits the part of a master musician coming to terms with the end of his playing career with a quiet gravitas; his eyes do most of the work. Also, the other members of the quintet play their roles as musicians quite well: the driven first violinist, Mark Ivanir, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing a man quite literally fed up with being second fiddle, and Catherine Keener, as the violist with emotional ties to all three of her fellow members. And I have to say that Imogene Poots (a name even P.G. Wodehouse would have fought shy of using in any of his writings) doesn't disgrace herself in a rather thankless role, as the daughter of Hoffman and Keener's character who inevitably has an affair with Ivanir's character. Where the film falls down is in the plot. It's not so much that the plot veers into melodrama, and from melodrama into farce; Beethoven's own life, after all, was redolent of both farce and melodrama. The problem is that all the melodramatic and farcical elements are so blatantly telegraphed. We see them all coming a mile off. A more damning problem I had with the film (after all, I do enjoy both farce and melodrama, in good cause), was the absurd use of Angelo Badalamenti's score to heighten the melodrama. I mean, here you have four very good actors, all perfectly capable of conveying emotion through their craft. The movie hinges on a performance of Beethoven's Opus 131, arguably the most sublime composition ever; why not use that for a score? I made it a point to sit through the final credits to the end, just to hear the end of the quartet. It might well have been the best part of the movie.
Review of A Late Quartet
