Revisionism seems to be all the rage in cinema of late. James Bond sheds his sex-pest guise to become a psychological flawed individual in Casino Royale; and Zhang Yimou implicitly salutes Chinese-style tyranny as benign rather than bedevilling in The Curse of the Golden Flower. Back in the world of biopics, photographer Diane Arbus was given a fictional romance with one of her subjects in Fur; and Sofia Coppola gives us Marie Antionette as a poor, little rich girl who was a victim of her own destiny.

Copying Beethoven is the latest vehicle to put history under the knife, and the result isn't pretty. Puritans will be aghast at the poetic licence screenwriters Stephen Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson took in making Ludwig von Beethoven's final years more human and emotionally engrossing than they were - what with a fictional young copyist, Anna Holtz, becoming the near-psychotic composer's salvation and muse as he struggles to complete his ninth symphony, his late string quartets and the Grosse Fuge.

To argue that historical figures should never be dramatised is churlish and blinkered. But to reinvent Beethoven as a brute who recants in the last year of his life undermines Copying Beethoven's integrity. Director Agnieszka Holland did better with the theme of a woman labouring relentlessly - and invisibly - to ensure the legacy of a male maestro with her screenplay for Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blue.

By highlighting the power of spiritual faith (presented here as Beethoven's reconciliation with God after a life of reckless egotism) and the pained efforts of female artists in an universe dominated by men, Holland has chosen to revisit themes she has examined regularly in her career. What she fails to repeat here, however, is the subtle beauty she used in her smaller-scale European productions.

Holland has conjured a remarkable performance from Ed Harris - whose portrayal of Beethoven follows his convincing turn as Jackson Pollock in 2000 - and Copying Beethoven is a lyrical and visually exciting piece, symbolised best by the extended (and highly fictional) sequence of Beethoven conducting his newly written Choral symphony. But the film overplays its style. The overwrought emotions and gaping holes in the back-stories torpedo the delicateness that should make Beethoven's relationship with Holtz work.

'When silence develops, your soul can sing,' Beethoven says to her near the end, as the pair make peace with each other and an unspoken tenderness finally bubbles to the surface. It's a line well said: the hectic melodrama between the pair prevented a build-up of the electrifying tensions that would have made their relationship taut yet not hackneyed. If Holland had left more to be seen but unspoken, Copying Beethoven would have been engaging viewing.

Copying Beethoven opens today