The 2000s Reviews

The beauty of an expanded Amadeus is that it gets the film back on the big screen
Friday, April 19, 2002
By William Arnold
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Even more than most "director's cuts," the expanded version of Milos Forman's 1984 masterpiece, Amadeus, seems a bit of a gimmick. My reference books all say Forman had final cut of the film, so what's his excuse for not getting what he wanted on the screen the first time around?

Still, who's complaining? Anything that can get this uniquely gorgeous film restored to its full splendor and back on the big screen where it belongs is certainly OK by me -- even the addition of 20 minutes of footage that doesn't really add much to the experience.

And, boy, does the movie hold up. I caught a screening the morning after the Oscars, and it was humblingly clear that none of last year's nominees had even half its sweep or scope: the entire post-1990 cinema hasn't seemed to manage anything near its ambition, skill or intelligence.

The film is, of course, a "fantasia" based on the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that won eight Oscars in 1984, including best picture, best director and best actor for F. Murray Abraham, who plays the film's narrator and venomously jealous point-of-view, Antonio Salieri.

It opens long after Mozart's death, when the aged Salieri -- once the most popular composer in Vienna of the 1780s but now completely forgotten -- is incarcerated in a madhouse after a recent suicide attempt, and is trying to confess his sins to a clueless priest.

As he does, the movie flashes back to tell the strange story of how he early on recognizes the genius of the childlike Mozart (Tom Hulce), but is so appalled by the man's moral unworthiness that he does everything he can to secretly retard his career.

Gradually, as Salieri becomes even more convinced of his rival's unearthly musical gifts, he becomes obsessed with destroying him, until his obsession finally takes the form of a demented challenge to God himself, and a plot to bring about Mozart's death and steal all his posthumous glory.

Adapted by Peter Shaffer from his long-running Broadway and West End stage hit (and based on a prominent theory that Salieri did actually poison Mozart), the script retains all of the play's savage irony about the strange shape of genius, the jealousy of the mediocre mind and the eternal nature of true art.

But the movie Amadeus goes far beyond anything the theater could do in terms of bathing us in Mozart's music, pulling us inside his creative process, and using authentic instruments, props and locations (including the very Prague theater where Mozart debuted "Don Giovanni") to bring his world to life.

In what was indisputably his finest moment as a filmmaker, Forman summoned the absolute best work of his craftsmen -- costumes, makeup, camerawork, production design -- and merged them with his own storytelling sense and his special way with actors to create what has to stand as cinema's most successful musical epic.

The film was a particular triumph for Abraham, who was a virtual unknown when he stole the role from the Hollywood A-list. Time has not dimmed that performance: his small-minded veniality -- his agonizing incredulity that God would dare give such a towering gift to such a silly twit -- is palpable, and gives the movie all its malignant force.

But Hulce's Mozart, with his goofy air and hyena laugh, holds up just as well. He didn't get half Abraham's credit (and has since faded from the limelight) but he's the perfect foil for Salieri's scheming outrage, and it's hard to image this great film working nearly as well with any other actor.