Amadeus is an uproariously funny movie in a liberal arts kind of way. No, you don't really laugh out loud; rather, you think to yourself, "that's damned funny." At three hours in length (and pushing 30 years in age), the film is easier to parody than to watch. But watch it we should––Amadeus tests us in ways that few movies have––and watch it we can: It's available on Netflix Instant.
It's the love story between court composer Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) and Mozart's music. It's also a hate story between Salieri and Mozart (played by Tom Hulce), as Salieri is unable to reconcile the genius of Mozart's music with Mozart the man's arrogance and brashness.
As Mozart takes on a wife, debts, and eventually the death of his own father, his music shifts from witty tunes to soul-searching operatic masterpieces. Meanwhile, his rival assumes an increasingly complicated relationship to the desperate artist––at first trying to sabotage his career, then moving on to an elaborate, Don Giovanni-inspired kind of psychological torture involving a Carnival mask and an opera commission. After Mozart collapses from fever and stress during a production of The Magic Flute, Salieri actually becomes an apprentice to the dying man, though their collaboration ("Requiem") is never completed, and hidden away by Mozart's wife.
Reflecting on this, Salieri asserts that God would rather kill Mozart than allow Salieri to lay a finger on Mozart's music. It's a compelling proof for the existence of a deity.
God may have kept the two men artistically separate, but on screen they share a compelling dynamic. Hulce plays a grubby, sensual Mozart charmed with flouting social convention and inspired by the musicality of the everyday world. (At one point, a tongue-lashing from his own mother-in-law becomes the voice of The Magic Flute's Queen of the Night.) Abraham paints Salieri as a rational, prim, self-satisfied schemer fond of candies and––despite his professed celibacy––the attentions of beautiful women. Were it not for their shared love of music, they would have nothing in common; even their sins are opposites.
The ur-play on which Amadeus is based, Alexander Pushkin's "Mozart and Salieri," took artistic license in describing the two competing composers' relationship, turning it into a morality play not dissimilar to Pushkin's short story, "The Queen of Spades," in which a gambling German learns a trick at cards that will make him a fortune. Like Salieri, he misplaces his faith and goes insane after being miraculously foiled.
A little of Pushkin's Russian-ness remains in the film. Salieri's pride and spite make him the quintessentially venial man whose machinations are futile in the face of Mozart's genius. Mozart is a boor with an annoying laugh and a propensity for drink: Neither he nor Salieri is wholly likable, but like the theatrical characters from a Dostoevsky novel, we're unable to hate either because in each we see bits of ourselves reflected in their flaws.
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