If you want a biography, get a textbook. If you want a story, watch this movie.

Rating: 8/10 (16 July 2009)

The way the tag-line is written, the movie sounds like some Disney film. Amadeus. The man. The music. The magic. The madness. The murder. The mystery. The motion picture. Anyway, this movie is very great. The acting is great, the music is great, the scenery is great. It is just one of those lovable classic films.
So I guess from just the title of the movie, you can assume that this film is based on the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. A biography if you may say. However, this movie is NOT a strict biography of Mozart's life. The movie is not a musical biography like Walk the Line or Ray. So if you were planning to learn all of the small details of Mozart's life, you ain't getting that in this movie. In fact, the background of the movie is based a lot on superstition and creative thinking with the relationship between Mozart and Salieri. We start off with Mozart's life in the movie with him proposing to Constanze, who is later known to be his wife and only wife. Before Mozart got married, there was so much more to his life as a child with the abuse of his father and having to travel all over Europe that could have supplemented his movie. Because in this movie, we learn that Mozart was not exactly a nice guy to be with. He was a social misfit, all because of a childhood he never had which was replaced by his father making him tour over Europe and showing off his musical abilities.
The main premise in this movie is about Salieri and the whole idea that he might have killed Mozart. Salieri tells the story from his perspective to a priest in an asylum about Mozart. Salieri was the most famous composer in all of England, but once Mozart came about, Salieri became a has-been. This got Salieri angry and the growing jealously of Salieri got him to the point where he dedicated his whole life to destroying Mozart. And like I said before, we do not know if this is true that Salieri did kill Mozart.
But enough with the negativity. I thought the acting was brilliant. Tom Hulce acts well as the unattractive and rowdy Mozart. F. Murray Abraham being Salieri was also just as great if not greater than Hulce. I mean they were both persuasive with their acting and used the material they were given for their characters and played it well. Also, there were scenes in the movie that you can tell required a lot of hard work to create because they either had a lot of men and women in the scene or because there was a great amount of sound editing going on. The director's cut clocks at three hours, but I guarantee you that you will be spell bounded for those three hours. Because although the movie does not have a fast pace, it still keeps you locked in.
I would say that the movie did have some scenes were it felt kind of 80s such as Mozart's antics and sexual insinuation that was placed in the movie. But none the less, this is a great story and I am glad that it was not a strict biography, because to tell you the truth, after watching this film, I would prefer this film over a strict biography. The creativeness that Forman and Shaffer add to it makes the movie only more special.
Low eight.