Emotional and musical perfection! COMPULSORY VIEWING - First of my 5 all-time favourites.

Rating: 10/10 (30 August 2002)

Momma! Emotional and musical perfection. Saul Zaentz's work is impeccable. Mindboggling--he does justice to Mozart!
"...Well, ...there it is."
From the two opening strains of Don Giovanni you know you're dead. Milos Forman matches shots-to-music in his prologue, like the master filmmaker he is.
The casting of Vincent Schiavelli is also a stroke of genius, as the smarmy peasant/valet to F-Murray Abraham's Antonio Salieri.
Schiavelli was perfect in serious roles, he's physically affecting. For Amadeus(1984) he reaches way back into the 18thC to grab it by the cravat, and suddenly, we're back there, with him! ...The sound fades nervously as Salieri is committing something in his room, and then suddenly we're STRUCK DOWN by stentorian violins as we see what Salieri has done to himself. We then quieten along with the music, as various people fuss at a distance getting Salieri onto the sled ambulance and into hospital. Night fades into day, and then.....we're in the nuthouse!
The prissy priest(Herman Meckler) taking Salieri's confession is the key to our own denouement. He is us. He's so familiar in 20thC terms that we instinctively connect to his all-at-sea-ineptitude trying to understand the demons of a man much older and more distinguished than himself. Salieri is that older man, bearing his guilt, but despising God whom the inept priest is there to represent. And we're the inept viewers of this uberdrama: common salt-of-the-earth trying to understand the life of a genius. The analogy is thoroughly obvious.
Amadeus in real life was paraded around as a prodigy from the age of 4 by his father (1760 was the birth of the "stage mother"). Based on this, Mozart was a psychologically tortured son, making his dissolution with wine, women, and vaudeville so understandable. Amongst his peers, only Salieri did not dismiss him. "This was no composition by a performing monkey. THIS was a music I'd never heard--filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God".
And that's our key: Amadeus(1984) is really a movie about Man vs God.
Indeed there really was a Salieri, but there is no evidence whatsoever that this drama occurred between them. It was Peter Shaffer's play that conjectured Salieri's envy of Mozart's talent "as a lust in my body".
Clearly, no composer of the 18thC would ever be able to comprehend Mozart's talents without equating it with the hand of God: "I was staring through the cage of those meticulous brushstrokes at an absolute beauty". Mozart was a savant (latest research suggests that all of us can become savants in one field but only at the cost of brain damage elsewhere). "Displace one note, and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase, and the structure would fall", admits Salieri, who secretly disagrees with the other Italians in Emperor Joseph II's court that Mozart's compositions have "too many notes". He understood well that an edifice of beauty is still a house of cards. Supremely jealous, however, he made a hate-filled pact with God: "because you choose for your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy, and give me for reward only the ability to recognize the incarnation--because you are unjust, unfair, unkind--I will block you".
It is in these scenery-chewing emotional confessions that Abraham, the actor, is best.
Even so, I am prepared to go out on a limb: he didn't deserve the Oscar if that meant that Thomas Hulce couldn't get one. I've known F-Murray first from the lowbrow comedy The Ritz(1976), and without a doubt, he was more at home--better--in that (as a flagrant yet lovable homosexual who befriends a straight innocent). In Amadeus(1984), Abraham's obsequiousness frequently looks awkward, and I can't just put it down to character. I've also witnessed a similar discomfort when he was a detective in Serpico(1973).
Both Tom Hulce and Jeffrey Jones (for Jones' unforgettable portrayal of Emperor Joseph II) should have received Oscars too.....but frankly, in a cast of this high caliber, it's a travesty to actually single anyone out! Returning to plot, it's always saddened me that Mozart and Salieri ALMOST connected during the last hours of Mozart's life. Unfortunately each maestro was a terrible judge of people. Salieri was forever dashing himself against Mozart's superior talent, while Amadeus arrogantly overused his single trump card until it stopped having impact.
What a waste of humanity that even such talented men should become so alienated by their male egos.
Amadeus's ignominious burial becomes finally comprehensible: he'd been an impetuous fellow who never appreciated that he needed the help of his peers if he was ever to live amongst them. The perennial problem of genius is how to survive being (mis)understood by those who vastly outnumber him.
Finally, in retelling his story to the priest, Salieri realizes that it was God himself, not he, Salieri, who killed Mozart. He finally laughs derisively at his religion, accusing the priest's "own 'merciful' God who destroyed His own beloved, rather than let a mediocrity share in the smallest part of His glory". Indeed, the priest has by the end of Salieri's confession lost all certainty in his own church line. And rightly so, because God-given talent can just as easily be the vehicle for Man's destruction. God always wins. Perhaps Einstein was overly generous to claim that "God does not play dice with the universe". Whether mediocre or a perfect talent, people are born to die unjustly, as indeed the entire ecosystem must (all living things rely on the death of others). So is not any level of analysis less than God's a worthless ruse? Salieri had the priest, and by eyeing the audience, us too, pegged right, as mediocrities. In the end, he declared himself their Patron Saint and took refuge in a sanitarium--another ignominy. Today we might diagnose him as suffering from (self-induced?) post-traumatic stress-disorder.
Watch this and BAWL--I did.10/10