Flak Magazine: Review of Amadeus, 04-19-02

It's more than a little fitting that Milos Forman's 1984 masterpiece, Amadeus, should be re-released on the heels of an Oscar victory by another tortured-genius film, A Beautiful Mind. Both movies try to put the sufferings of the preternaturally brilliant into terms that the lower-IQ masses can understand. Both approach their subjects with an almost reverential awe. But while A Beautiful Mind ultimately collapses in on a mushy "love conquers all/geniuses are people too" populism, Amadeus gives us what we really want, what we really feel when we see others excel at things we could only dream of approaching — bitter, sinfully deep jealousy.

Forman is a director of eclectic tastes and themes. He's done crazy (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), he's done jealousy (Valmont), he's done genius (Man on the Moon). Many of his other films take us directly into the mind of the character at issue — remember how uncomfortably close we get to the mind of a smut baron in The People vs. Larry Flynt? But Amadeus may be his crowning achievement, because it brings so many of his themes together and, more importantly, gives them to us through the eyes of someone more like us than his iconoclast protagonists.

Amadeus, written by Peter Shaffer from his own play, is told from the perspective of Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), the Habsburg court composer during Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's brief but ridiculously productive career and the man rumored to have facilitated, if not caused, the death of possibly the world's greatest musician. We get the story years later: While confined to a mental ward after an attempted suicide, the aging Salieri relates his life to a young priest, and we're never sure if he is being completely honest with his narrative. But if he is crazy, he was made that way by envy.

Salieri was a real composer, and in his time a fairly well-respected one (people aren't named Habsburg court composer for nothing). His music is somewhat plodding and derivative, but also tightly composed and structured, clearly the product of someone dedicated to his craft. And this is the Salieri we get in the film — a musical monk who has promised God his chastity in return for talent. But Salieri's rising star was dimmed by the sudden arrival of Mozart (played in the film by Tom Hulce) from the court of the prince archbishop of Salzburg. Mozart swept through the Vienna music scene like an Alpine snowstorm, composing the majority of his more than 600 works, including 30 piano concertos, 52 symphonies and 27 string quartets while in residence there. The rest is history, as far as the record goes; very little is known about the relationship between Salieri and Mozart, and whether the envious killed the genius is a secret never to be revealed.

Mozart, at least as far as Amadeus is concerned, was an annoying, immature prankster, and at the film's end, when he is buried penniless in a potter's field, we feel sympathy for the wife and child he leaves behind, but not him. His character is brilliant yet patronizing, whimsical yet distant, hardly human. His genius is pure beauty, a creative flame burning so brightly we can hardly look at it. Operas spring fully formed from his mind. He listens to his mother-in-law complain about how he treats his wife, and all he can hear is the final aria from The Magic Flute. And yet he is also a man, the man Salieri wishes he could be.

We have all, at one time or another, been Salieri. The doctor who has struggled his entire life to grasp the intricacies of the surgical process only to watch an upstart intern master it with ease, he is Salieri. The aspiring young writer who struggles daily just to craft a simple short story only to find, one day on the new releases table, a polished, Michiko Kakutani-approved novel written by someone two years her junior, she is Salieri. Even the assistant sales manager, who puts in extra hours on an account only to see a junior executive waltz in and close five in the first month — he's Salieri too.

We see these people and we want them dead. Gone from the picture. There's something wrong here, we say. They can't be all that. There must be a catch. But then we examine their work, read their book, watch them work the phones, and we realize that no, there's nothing wrong here. They are simply the evocation of everything we've ever wanted — the effortless style, the ease with the knife, the cutting turn of phrase.

Jealousy of condition is an everyday occurrence — we want what the celebrities want, we see beautiful townhouses and we think yes, somehow, I deserve that. But jealousy of ability is another matter, and it's fortunately a much rarer affliction. Normally we can toss it off, ascribe someone's success to nepotism or wealth, and go to sleep convinced that we are still just as good as they are. Occasionally, though, we find ourselves squarely in the Salieri seat — confronted with the brute truth that despite our considerable skill, we will never be as good as them. They are simply, objectively, better.

On his own, Salieri is a pretty good composer, and he knows it, too. Unfortunately, he's also just good enough to recognize all the ways Mozart outdoes him. Salieri's talent is the result of self-denial and hard work, of serious dedication; when he sees someone as naturally talented as Mozart embarass himself and throw his life away, he can't help but wonder why God has turned against him. While we may not all put it in such starkly religious terms, isn't this something we have all felt, at one time or another?

F. Murray Abraham won the Best Actor Oscar for his work on Amadeus, and not simply because he narrated it. Salieri doesn't exist merely to explain Mozart — on the contrary, Mozart's role is to explain Salieri's jealousy. When Mozart launches into his hyena laugh, when he commits one faux pas after another in the Habsburg court, we don't feel badly for him. We pity Salieri, watching in the wings; we know what he's thinking, that he's spent his life working hard to get where he is, and then this. Amadeus isn't about the beauty of genius — it's about the unfairness that genius creates in a world populated by well-meaning but ultimately average people. It's a film fit for a world of Salieris.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)