Why is immortal beloved rated r

Then, the rest of the film follows devoted friend and secretary Anton Schindler Jeroen Krabbe , as he attempts to discover the identity of the title character, a mysterious woman who is referred to in Beethoven's final letter, a handwritten last will and testament. Schindler's first discovery is that this woman apparently had an aborted hotel rendezvous with Beethoven, which led to his behaving like a petulant rock star. In the first of several flashbacks, we see him tear the hotel room apart.

The one concrete piece of evidence Schindler obtains is an illegible signature from the hotel register. And he's off to solve the mystery. His two primary suspects are a pair of tempestuous countesses Valeria Golino, Isabella Rossellini , who explain to Schindler their relationships with Beethoven.

And we come to see that the musical genius was a wild-eyed, arrogant jerk who became more and more unbearable with age, and, it is suggested, as his deafness worsened with the passing years. Beethoven's antisocial behavior is also credited to his drunken and abusive father, who may have inadvertently contributed to Beethoven's musical genius by driving him to inward expressions of passionate rage.

The person who suffers most at Beethoven's angry hand, however, is his sister-in-law Johanna Johanna Ter Steege. He is extremely abusive toward her, and late in the film he manages to gain custody of her son.

In one of the film's lengthier passages, he attempts to make the boy a musical prodigy, though he has no talent — which ultimately drives the lad to violence. Not only is he shown to be a selfish, crabby, arrogant womanizer which is probably accurate , but we're rarely given more than a surface look into his personality. Because we're forced to watch him from an emotional distance, it's difficult to generate much sympathy. By extension, the identity of Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved" is less a great mystery than a minor curiosity.

There are times when the script is unworthy of the subject matter, and occasions when Oldman's co-stars especially Marco Hofschneider, who plays Beethoven's nephew Karl seem ill-suited to their roles.

Nevertheless, negatives aside, the plot holds the viewer's interest, even if it doesn't touch the heart. A man is shown kissing a woman and trying to force sex on her. A man tries to shoot himself causing a bloody gash across his forehead. There are many scenes of yelling and Beethoven's cruelty towards his relatives. A father threatens to beat his son and chases after him.

A group of boys taunt Beethoven and kick him. A rape scene leaves the victim with a bloody neck from a knife. If there are moments when we doubt Beethoven was thinking exactly these images as he composed, there are others when the momentum of the story takes over, and we identify with a tortured genius whose deafness cut him off from the immortal sounds he was giving to mankind. Beethoven is played in the film by Gary Oldman , who at first seems an unlikely choice: Too small, too driven, too insinuating.

Then we see that he is right. He is a man on the edge of madness, obsessed with women, even more obsessed with Karl Marco Hofschneider , the young nephew he hopes to turn into a prodigy. He wages a lifelong campaign of hate against Karl's mother, Johanna Johanna Ter Steege , telling his brother Caspar Christopher Fulford she is a foul slut. The movie proposes an interesting explanation of Beethoven's hatred of her and love for her son, one which sensible biographers will question, but that fits perfectly with the terms of the story.

If Johanna is, by default, one of the three most important women in Beethoven's life, the other two are Countess Giulietta Guicciardi Valeria Golino , who becomes his student and patron, and the older, wiser Countess Anna Maria Erdody Isabella Rossellini , who stands up to Beethoven after he has gone into court to wrest young Karl away from Johanna, his mother.

In the scenes with Giulietta we see Beethoven's status as the most sought-after lion of the European musical scene; in his day, a great composer was the equivalent of today's rock stars, swooned over and showered with attention. He becomes the countess' piano teacher, but does not always play the game according to her world's rules: "A mistake is nothing," he tells her, "but the fact that you thump out the notes without the least sensitivity to their meaning is unforgivable, and your lack of passion is unforgivable.

I shall have to beat you. The scenes with the Rossellini character are among the best in the film, because here he finds a haven from his debts, from his troubles with the law, from his wars with his relatives, from his fawning admirers and mocking rivals. She sees most clearly his curious obsession with young Karl, which takes an odd turn: Beethoven stops composing entirely for five years in order to supervise Karl's education as a music virtuoso, despite the boy's tearful pleas to be allowed to become a soldier.

Beethoven's deafness is a subject through much of the film, including a precarious scene where the Rossellini character leads him from the stage after he grows confused during a public performance, and another in which he touches the wood of a pianoforte to hear the music through his fingers.

He tried desperately to conceal his deafness, fearing it would destroy his livelihood, and on the soundtrack Rose sometimes reproduces what he can hear: Low rumbles curiously like the music of the whales.