Green Eyed Monsters.

Rating: 7/10 (21 February 2012)

There's a scene near the beginning when we are first being introduced to the horny and slightly zany Mozart (Hulce), when he enters the court of the Austrian Emperor, surrounded by outlandishly attired royalty, couturiers, chatelains, stewards, Knights of the Round Table, personal trainers, and shoe shine boys. The Court Composer, Salieri (Abraham), admires the twenty-six year old Mozart with a passion and has written a little tune to celebrate his arrival at the court.
Mozart is pleased and flattered. He asks if he can play it at the piano. He sits down and plays the simple ditty. Then, listening intently, he hits one of the chords again and again, and asks, "That's a little off, don't you think? Shouldn't it go like this?" Then he rips through the tune, deconstructs it, and does to it what Sonny Rollins did to "I'm An Old Cowhand" and Stan Getz did to "Autumn in New York." Salieri looks on. His smile slowly fades into a frown. And the plot is set in motion. Salieri has slaved all his life to become a composer, driven by his love of music, in spite of his poor background and a father whose discouragements were strenuous.
And here is this young punk, prodded on by a stern musician father, performing as a child before royalty, a prodigy, giggling maniacally, mocking him, rippling along and making Salieri's tune sound like something children might sing in Kindergarten.
Salieri hates Mozart for being everything that Salieri is not. He plots against him, tries to knee-cap his career, spies on him, makes an attempt to steal his work even when Mozart is on his death bed, expiring in his mid-thirties. Salieri winds up telling the tale in flashback to a priest who visits him in the insane asylum in his old age.
The curious thing is that Mozart really WAS a musical prodigy. He could play the piano when he was tall enough to reach the keys. He learned the violin. He wrote a minuet was he was eight and had his first symphony published as a prepubescent boy. A similar skill in mathematics shows up at a similar age. By the time Mozart was my age, he'd been dead for thirty or forty years. It's a sobering thought. Too sobering. Calls for a bit of single malt neat. Hold on a moment.
There, that's better. Thank you. Those musical skills are obviously something constitutional. The subsequent opportunities to "learn" how to do it are adventitious. It's "curious" because it makes you wonder, if this ability isn't confined to a single culture, how many Mozarts have been born and died unrecognized among, say, the Australian aborigines. Not only didn't they have a stage father. They didn't know what a piano was. They had no instruments at all that allowed one to control the notes being played.
It's also "curious" because neither musical talent nor skill in higher mathematics is measured on any of the usual intelligence tests. Psychologists tend to dismiss these skills as mere "aptitudes" or "talents", as if calling them by a dismissive name discounts their importance. (The fact is probably that you can't measure them easily with a pencil and paper test.) Anyway, returning to the film, Abraham deserved his Academy Award, for what it's worth. He's quite good. So is Jeffrey Jones as the Emperor with the impenetrable expression and the eyes of a carp. Hulce and Berridge, who plays Mozart's wife Constanze, look the part but sound like two kids from Sherman Oaks. Hulce has the added disadvantage of speaking like Ryan O'Neal. I'm not certain that semi-deranged cackle was necessary -- we get the picture without it -- but okay.
Most of Mozart's music that we see on the screen are excerpts from his operas. I was never a big fan of opera. But I suppose in a big splashy award-winning movie you must fill the screen with colorful display. What's the alternative? Have Mozart sit at the piano and play one of his breathtaking sonatas? Milos Forman must have learned from MTV that you can't even do that with Elton John.