Amadeus

Amadeus

Opening Shot

Vienna, 1823. An old man screams "Mozart!" and slits his throat. Servants break down the door. Antonio Salieri, aged and institutionalized, begins his confession. Miroslav Ondříček shoots the asylum in cold, gray tones that will contrast brutally with the gilt-and-candlelight of the flashbacks. Forman opens with the end because the end is where the poison lives. Salieri has spent forty years composing a narrative of his own victimhood, and the film is that narrative, which means every frame is unreliable.

What It Does

Ondříček's cinematography gives 18th-century Vienna the texture of a fever dream. The opera sequences are lit from below, from candles, from footlights, giving the performers an otherworldly glow. The party scenes are chaotic, overstuffed, bodies in motion. When Salieri first hears Mozart's music, the camera holds on his face while the score floods the soundtrack, and Ondříček lights him like a man receiving a religious vision that will ruin his life.

The music is, obviously, the film's greatest asset. Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields perform Mozart's compositions with a clarity that the film's sound design places directly in your ear. Forman's genius is in choosing which pieces accompany which scenes: the Requiem underscoring Salieri's confession, The Marriage of Figaro played during the opera scenes with the same real-time tension as a sports broadcast. You don't need to know classical music. You need ears.

F. Murray Abraham's Salieri is one of the great screen performances of jealousy. He doesn't play a villain. He plays a man who loves music more than anyone in the film, including Mozart, and whose love is the instrument of his destruction. His reading of Mozart's scores, where Abraham's face shifts from professional evaluation to genuine awe to shattered recognition that he will never produce anything this good, is the film's central scene. Tom Hulce's Mozart, giggling and vulgar, is the delivery mechanism for the cruelty: God chose this guy.

Why It's on the List

Amadeus is the best film ever made about the difference between competence and genius, and the particular agony of being able to recognize greatness you cannot produce. Forman took Peter Shaffer's play and opened it up into something cinematic: the opera sequences are staged as genuine spectacle, the Vienna locations are used rather than recreated, and the Requiem composition sequence (Mozart dictating from his deathbed while Salieri transcribes) is the most riveting depiction of artistic creation in any medium.

The Argument Against

The historical liberties are substantial. Salieri didn't murder Mozart (probably). The rivalry is largely Shaffer's invention. Hulce's bratty Mozart, while entertaining, reduces a complex historical figure to a caricature, and the film's thesis (genius is God's cruelty to the talented) is more dramatically satisfying than historically defensible. The 160-minute runtime could trim some of the court intrigue without losing the central dynamic.

Closing Image

Salieri is wheeled through the asylum, blessing the other patients, calling himself the patron saint of mediocrity. He blesses you too, directly into the camera. Mozart's laughter echoes on the soundtrack. The patron saint of mediocrity smiles. He found his role. It's the only revenge available to someone God refused to bless.