quick movie review: “Amadeus”
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September 27th, 2007
While I really really really like Amadeus, I do have a complaint about it.
The problem with Amadeus is that when it’s over, you really don’t know anything more about the real-life Mozart than you did before you saw the movie–but you think you do. The movie is so good, and so convincing in its artistry and drama that even if you tell yourself “Well, I know that they cooked up a lot of this to make a good story,” you believe you can pick out the little bits of truth that serves as the basis of the film.
Except that you can’t. From looking around the internet (and reading articles like this one), I get the feeling that musicologists were seething in 1984 at what the public thought about Mozart, having been “educated” by Amadeus. (Lindsey, feel free to speak up if you have any insight here)
It’s interesting to me, really, because there are other characters whose lives have been fitted into dramas that didn’t really happen. Elvis has had it happen to him, as has Mark Twain, and even Sherlock Holmes who is fictional to begin with, and still we’re somehow able to tell ourselves “Well, this didn’t really happen to Sherlock Holmes, he’s just being used in a story.” Maybe it’s because we’re familiar enough with the life of Elvis to know when some playwright or screenwriter is playing a fun game with us, but as a general public, we don’t really know much about the life of Mozart so we’ll take anything we’re given and slide it neatly into the empty and waiting “True Mozart Biography” file in our brains.
All that being said, however, I really enjoy this film. Milos Forman has an uncanny ability to make movies that are really striking. I don’t know how else to say it–there are several movies of his that I enjoy, and almost every scene in them has something to latch onto. The locations and scenery are so rich and wonderful. (I believe they shot the film in Prague, which still has enough old-style architecture to pass for 18th century Vienna) The costumes are equally as beautiful. I get the idea that the art direction team on this movie was in seventh heaven, designing everything down to the last buttonhole and doorknob.
Like All About Eve, this is another movie whose title character isn’t really the main focus. F. Murray Abraham plays Antonio Salieri to such perfection, “Salieri” has even entered our general lexicon as a metaphor for someone who is able to recognize true talent and beauty where others cannot, but is only able to achieve mediocrity themselves. (Again, I’m almost certain this wasn’t true of the actual Salieri) As for Tom Hulce as Mozart, he makes Mozart fun and a little childlike–watch how excited he is to conduct his first opera at the Viennese court!–only growing more serious towards the film’s final act when heavier issues bear down on him.
(gosh, it’s hard trying to write these things without giving the story away!)
Amadeus was originally a play written for the stage by Peter Shaffer, and Shaffer served as screenwriter as well. I’d be interested to see the play, as I’ve heard that it is structurally very different than the film. As I understand it, the play is much more sparse and abstract than the film. I have to wonder how much Milos Forman had a hand in working with Shaffer to broaden the story and scenes–he performed a similar feat with Hair, which has a pretty moving story on screen but is hardly as fleshed out in the original stage production.
I’d recommend Amadeus to just about anyone, unless you have a debilitating aversion to period dramas. It is so approachable, and yet so rich in its texture. And the music, Mozart’s music, really captures you and can spin you into reverie. Near the end of the film there’s a scene… well, you’ll see if you pick up the film… I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard anything like it anywhere else in musical cinema.
Wonderful, wonderful. See this movie. 
