nice try

Rating: 5/10 (20 July 2003)

I honestly cannot fathom the enduring popularity of this film. It is over-produced, garish and vulgar, directed with a ham-fist by Milos Forman...and would appear to be only incidentally about Mozart's music. I know, I know, the point is that hapless, buffoonish Mozart was also, ironically, a prolific and endlessly inventive fountain of matchlessly elegant, mostly joyous and altogether perfect music (though emphatically and unfortunately not the politically astute schemer that the plodding, envious and sinister Salieri was). However interesting the conception of this film undeniably is as a dramatic device, would not an important additional point of a biographical picture about the life and times of a composer be to attempt to somehow relate that life to the creation of his music? I don't imagine that this relationship was quite as arbitrary and incidental as it is presented here; the music itself, and its connection with Mozart's life and soul, is given pretty short shrift, in my opinion, and is not in fact a subject at all. The screen is instead filled to bursting, like an over-stuffed sofa, with broad cartoonish performances, frantic cutting, goggle-eyed camera work, and hideous wigs and make-up that attempt unsuccessfully to present a highly stylised re-creation of the Eighteenth Century. Where in all of this indigestible and copious display is the soul and spirit of Mozart's matchless elegance, lightness and clarity, which was in many ways the definitive musical expression of the soul and spirit of the Eighteenth Century itself? Not anywhere apparent that I can detect. If you, as a filmgoer, want to experience a magically evocative and completely realised stylisation of the 18th C. I suggest you view "Fellini's Casanova" (and ignore the dubbing and stilted performances). And if you want to see a brilliantly expressive and gorgeous film about a Great Composer (Beethoven), and his times, his soul and his music, and his enigmatic life as an artist, then seek out, and savor, "Immortal Beloved"(1994). A magnificent film, and everything that busy, noisy tedious and empty "Amadeus" is not. Sorry, but "Amadeus" stinks.