Miloš Forman’s film about Mozart and Salieri is funny, cruel and deeply involving, with F. Murray Abraham making envy painfully understandable. Mozart’s childishness occasionally wears thin, but the music and the rivalry hold us for the full 160 minutes.
Miloš Forman’s Amadeus is a film we would recommend to someone with no particular interest in classical music. Peter Shaffer’s screenplay gives us a gifted composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and a rival, Antonio Salieri, who understands just how much better Mozart is. Salieri has enough musical judgement to appreciate what he cannot produce, and the film makes his predicament funny without making it painless. At 160 minutes, there is time to hear the music, enjoy the bad behaviour and begin to feel uncomfortable about how easily we understand the envy.
F. Murray Abraham gives Salieri the intelligence the part needs; a merely foolish rival would leave us with much less to watch. The sequence in which he describes hearing Mozart’s music for the first time moved us more than we expected. He is so absorbed in describing what he hears that we briefly forget how much he dislikes its composer. His delight in the music makes the envy hurt. Abraham can go well beyond ordinary conversational emphasis because we believe that Salieri has something worth saying about what he hears.
Tom Hulce makes Mozart gauche, immature and sometimes exhausting company, with a laugh that could make a patient person reconsider their principles. There is something liberating about a film that allows a great composer to be this much of a nuisance. Hulce’s behaviour also gives Abraham something solid to react against: Salieri does not have to search far for grounds to dislike the man. The music makes those grounds seem embarrassingly inadequate.
Miroslav Ondříček photographs the grand period settings without letting them dwarf the actors. Patrizia von Brandenstein’s production design supplies plenty to look at, and Theodor Pištěk’s costumes help make public life look like an occasion for showing off. The clothes and surroundings make the vulgarity funnier: these people have gone to some trouble to look respectable. Forman keeps the operatic set pieces within the same lively, unruly film, allowing the spectacle to sit comfortably alongside the quarrelling and the comedy.
Editors Nena Danevic and Michael Chandler keep a long film moving without reducing the musical performances to brief proofs of Mozart’s talent. We need to listen for ourselves if Salieri’s response is going to carry any weight, and the film gives us that chance. Mozart’s music is allowed to command our attention, which makes the return to wounded pride and bad manners more awkward. These passages are a substantial part of the pleasure, even without the rivalry to explain their presence. The editing allows time for us to enjoy them.
The weakness is that Forman and Shaffer occasionally insist too hard on Mozart’s childishness, and Hulce can become repetitive once the initial surprise has passed. Elizabeth Berridge’s Constanze Mozart brings a welcome directness beside the leads, though the writing gives her less room to develop. Yet Forman’s willingness to be bawdy remains a relief in a genre prone to treating a composer’s reputation as sufficient reason to sit quietly for an evening. The film offers ample pleasure to anyone who has never identified an aria and does not intend to start. Give it an uninterrupted evening and enough volume for the music.
