Amadeus Blogathon: A Music Apart from Men

Let’s get one thing very clear: Amadeus is not history. Nor, for the most part, does it pretend to be. Milos Forman’s film, for all its acclaim, has attracted its share of scorn over the years, often from those who find it to be an inadequate portrait of the real-life entity known as Mozart (to say nothing of the real-life entity known as Salieri, an accomplished composer who in his later years actually taught some of the greatest musical minds of all time). Liberties taken with the historical/biographical record are nothing new – especially for a film based not on fact but on a stage play, which itself was based on another play which became an opera. But there is one aspect of Amadeus’s poetic license that’s worth dwelling on, because it reveals something very profound about the film’s intentions – and, just perhaps, brings us around to (gasp) a better understanding of Mozart himself.

Amadeus Blogathon: Antonio Salieri's Totally Awesome Eighties Flashback Weekend

This entry in the Amadeus blogathon comes from filmmaker Matthew Wilder.

The Eighties were a rough time to come of age as a movie lover. Almost all the good stuff snuck in through the back door. Brazil, Blade Runner, Once Upon a Time in America, The King of Comedy, Southern Comfort, King Lear, Do the Right Thing; the only great moviemaker in that era pulling up to a VIP parking space and whistling while he worked was Steven Spielberg. It bums me out now when today’s retro-minded hipsters go to a revival joint and Get That Eighties Feeling, putting on their rainbow-colored wrist-sweat-bands and covering their torsos in fake Rubik’s Cubes, watching crapola like Legend and Labyrinth and Willow and Just One of the Guys and Lost Boys and Goonies and Satisfaction and—well, all the shit people at the time were cringing through to get to the good stuff. That’s what’s now called “the Eighties.”

One movie that bridged the gap between the high-minded and the genuinely popular was Milos Forman’s Amadeus. Smart teenagers of the time dug it. The gibes against it were obvious. First and foremost, it was “middlebrow”—an adjective John Simon, Andrew Sarris, Stanley Kauffmann and La Pauline could all agree upon. Based on a play by Peter Shaffer (or wait—was it Anthony?), Amadeus focused on what everyone concurred was a pretty banal theme: the war between cagy, politic, shucking-and-jiving mediocrity, and God-given genius. And yes, depicting mediocrity as hand-wringing, evilly cackling Salieri (a hall-of-fame F. Murray Abraham) and giggly, pottymouthed, infantile Mozart (one-hit-wondrous Thomas Hulce) was cartoonish, simple-minded. And then there was the matter of Milos Forman’s style: the periwigs, the beautymarked boobies, the Barry Lyndonian candelabra, the firehose of Metro Goldwyn Mayeresque excess that the Czech expat spritzed across the stage—er, screen.