review for Mahler on AllMovie

Though Mahler may be familiar as yet another of Ken Russell's biographies of composers, this film is relatively free of the director's characteristic excesses. As the composer returns to Vienna, he contemplates such difficulties in his life as his demanding father and stormy marriage, as well as such psychological problems as his guilt over an expedient conversion to Catholicism and an obsessive fear of death. The film emphasizes the composer's need for solitude, partly due to a hypersensitive nature and partly a condition of his creative work. While Russell's treatment of the composer is surprisingly reverent, the mild, ethereal Robert Powell was perhaps not the best actor to play a role which might have been better filled by someone like Anthony Hopkins. But in general the film is well made, and for anyone looking for an introduction to the composer and his extraordinary music it wouldn't be a bad place to start.