All biopics about creative artists are virtually identical - this one excepted

Rating: 10/10 (10 August 1999)

Thank heavens there's none of that tortured genius stuff. You know the line: X is a great composer, but what makes him great is that he pours out the innermost secrets of his soul when he sits down to write music, music which burns with blah, blah, blah. Mozart here is a professional musician of abnormal talent, but his talent is no more a part of his soul than, say, his political beliefs are, and his character has neither more nor less depth than Salieri's does. When Mozart suffers it's for the same mundane reasons that everyone else suffers. This allows Forman and Shaffer, for once in history, to tell a different story about a composer.
The legend of Mozart and Salieri is an old one now and this movie is really the story of the legend. Considered purely as a legend it's one of the best stories I know of. (Considered as fact it's false. This makes no difference to the aesthetic worth of "Amadeus". A legend is a legend.) Salieri is a mediocrity who ascends to some measure of success by dint of hard work and perhaps a little bluff. Mozart is a genius who composes better music than Salieri ever could, without any effort. Salieri's unique torture is that he is the only person who can see this - indeed, Salieri is in all respects the only clear-sighted person in the entire film. Salieri is SO clear-sighted that when he later expresses the belief that divine intervention was responsible for some of the things that happened, I am inclined to believe him (in the film, that is; not in real life). "I'm a vulgar man," says Mozart at one point. "But I assure you, my music is not." Mozart really is intolerably gauche, but all in all no-one understands him so well as Salieri does.
Many of the events seem like padding in retrospect but a particular kind of atmosphere has been so carefully built up that I'm reluctant to suggest that any particular scene was unnecessary. One thing I think ought to have been omitted was the section detailing Mozart's "vaudeville" compositions. All it does is reinforce the most ridiculous and irrelevant of Shaffer's themes. Mozart's worth, Shaffer is saying, was best suited to and best appreciated by the lower orders of society, by the Common People. Aristocrats just didn't have a clue and preferred to listen to stodge. This (a) is a tiresome cliché, (b) is the complete reverse of the truth and (c) undercuts the pure beauty of the Mozart and Salieri legend to some degree (since it's essential that Salieri be the only person who realises Mozart's worth while Mozart is alive).
This is a minor quibble. Forman and Shaffer have so adroitly avoided the dreadfully hammy postures of classical music movies that I can forgive this inconsequential slip. They've even avoided the temptation to simply quote all the best bits of Mozart's music. Music is instead chosen for its dramatic effectiveness and appropriateness. Compare "Amadeus" to "Immortal Beloved" in this respect. "Immortal Beloved" merely has a better soundtrack. "Amadeus" is by far the better film.