Amadeus (1984) *

Rating: 2/10 (3 January 2005)

To be blunt, I found AMADEUS to be one of the most Overrated and preposterous bores in all of motion picture history, and that goes back a long way now. It's not very often that I'm this clueless as to the almost universal appeal of a certain highly revered work of cinematic art, but I just couldn't help wondering just what was supposed to be so damned compelling about this very, very lengthy and dramatically vacant exercise in tedium?
For openers, I just couldn't buy Tom (NATIONAL LAMPOON'S ANIMAL HOUSE) Hulce as "the" Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. From the very moment he first came on screen, groping after an equally miscast Elizabeth Berridge as his fiancée-wife, I knew I was in for a very rough ride; here I was only 20 minutes into this thing and already the leading lovers were utterly irritating ... and with 140 minutes left to go!
Hulce looks like what he is - a 20th Century guy in a 1700's period white wig - and though she's actually over the age of 20, Berridge hardly appears old enough to play anything but his kid sister. Somebody should have told these two to lose their modern accents; Berridge loves to say "gonna" ("I'm not gonna marry you") and she tells someone that "only an idiot would ask Wolfie to work on that 'stuff'". Oh well. All the same, I'd imagine that speaking in a proper 1700's dialect would have sounded even more out of date while delivering such silly dialog as this:
MOZART: "Here, everything goes backwards. People walk backwards and dance backwards and sing backwards and even talk backwards.
GIRL: "That's stupid".
MOZART: "Why? People fart backwards..."
How idiotic. But this is not limited only to these two bozos; even another character uses the modern expression: "if you marry him you won't have a pot to p*ss in". It also seems like the phrase "kiss my ass" was very popular back in the days of Mr. Wolfie, too.
Enough about the dialog. There is still one glimmer of hope in all this mess - and that's F. Murray Abraham (who won the Best Actor Oscar) as Antonio Salieri. What very little there is to admire in this movie is solely owed to his interesting performance, and in the character himself. Maestro Salieri's overwhelming envy of his childish colleague's superior talents, and the gradual resentment he feels toward God for leaving him in the dust of mediocrity, is the only saving grace keeping the film from total ruin. It's a pity that this angle of the story was historical fiction, though.
And then there was that giggle... that ever-present, idiotic giggle...
* out of ****