Amadeus is an entertaining if factually dubious biopic

Rating: 8/10 (23 December 2017)

At the heart of Amadeus's narrative is Antonio Salieri's jealous admiration for Mozart's prodigious talent, with the wider meaning being about unearned privilege and power attempting to control and hinder creative genius. The most odious example of this is Count Orsini-Rosenberg (Charles Kay), the Emperor's most pompous little minion.
It's also a film about the selfishness and immorality of faith, as shown in Salieri's obsessive behaviour and the faith he uses to explain it. Salieri, who jokes that he is the 'patron saint of mediocrity', believes that God gave musical genius to a crude, immature young man like Mozart just to spite him. Blinded by his self-absorption, it doesn't occur to Salieri that his anxieties are trivial and insignificant because he believes God is omnipotent - 'He' can listen to everyone's concerns no matter how trivial they are. So on the delusion continues...
The film's main strengths are the leading performances from Abraham and Hulce, the opulent design work and the flashback narrative construction. This combination makes for a very absorbing film for the first 120 minutes or so, but Mozart's quite sudden decline did lose me somewhat. Could bereavement and a challenging project really cause such a spirited young man such damage? Well, it's little surprise that his decline would seem dubious because Mozart's mysterious death remains the subject of heated debate.
Criticisms are few and minor. Some of the language is rather inappropriate for a film set in the high-society of 18th century Vienna -would Mozart really have said "kiss my ass"? Also, the film's authenticity was wounded by the American accent of Tom Hulce, who otherwise does a great job.