Julia Sirmons
It’s easy to like Mozart. Of all the great classical music geniuses, his music is the most lively, playful, and fun. To love Mozart, obsessively, is an entirely different thing. He leaves you enraptured and itching to know how he did it. No one had a worse case of this than Morzart’s number-one fanboy, the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. “Immortal Mozart!” he wrote. “You to whom I owe everything, to whom I owe the loss of my reason, the wonder that gripped my soul.”
In Amadeus, Miloš Forman’s masterful biopic, Mozart’s number-two fanboy is Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), a court composer who is more successful but less talented. Via a flashback structure, an elderly Salieri laments his “mediocrity” (as well as his role in his role in his rival’s early death). But as a music lover, he cannot help but marvel at Mozart’s work, and he spends much of the film as Kierkegaard describes himself: “humming what I do not understand, haunting like a ghost what I cannot enter into.”
The Salieri character makes Amadeus a classic that sets the standard for biopics. Not only does his scheming make for a ripping (if highly fictionalized) yarn, but his alternately loving and spiteful obsession with Mozart’s music teaches the audience how to love it themselves. As Salieri, Abraham owns the movie: his dour demeanor and fits of pompous seething make his performance a canonical portrait of professional jealousy. Tom Hulce’s Mozart seems more of a cartoon, remembered for a maniacallly boyish giggle. Hulce knows that Mozart, a former child star, was likely a huge pain in the ass: he amps up the bratty arrogance to the degree that you, like Salieri, long to slap the smirk off this pink-wigged twerp. But the performance has greater depths: Hulce’s beseeching eyes can convey intense yearning. The man whose genius divides him from the world seeks to touch the humanity that he loves but still views with some remove.
Mozart saw himself primarily as a composer of operas, and Amadeus portrays him as such. Operatic spectacle allows cinema to visually communicate the power of music. But opera is also where the ineffable beauty of music meets characterization and drama. The middle section chronicles the making of the opera The Marriage of Figaro; it’s about, in the words of composer Matthew Aucoin, ““everything that’s irresistible and brilliant and sexy about human beings, and of the things that make us so infuriating to one another.” In its finale, a Countess forgives her philandering husband, and all the characters sing a wondrous chorus of relief and contentment. It’s one of the most sublime moments in all of Western art. From it, Forman crafts a sequence that feeds the Mozart obsessive’s endless quest to find the border between the human and the divine in his work.
For Mozart, Figaro begins with this idea of forgiveness. It is a forgiveness that everyone in the film has been longing for: Mozart wants it from his father, a forbidding figure who’s constantly disappointed that his son likes parties and bathroom humor. Salieri wants it from the God he has forsaken with his scheming and his jealousy. We hear just a snippet of Figaro’s music, where the orchestra introduces the Count’s plea for mercy. Mozart scribbles on sheet music that’s strewn across a billiard table, and he idly rolls a ball around the table as he writes. Right now, the characters he’s creating are just like this: abstractions, hapless atoms bouncing around trying to figure out how they relate to one another. His heart still needs to catch up with his brilliance.
In order to put on the show, Mozart needs the approval of Emperor Joseph II (a gloriously unimpressed Jeffrey Jones). The play Figaro is based on was controversial for its skewering of the aristocracy, and the emperor doesn’t want any plebes getting restless. It’s a very high stakes pitch meeting. Tap dancing as fast as he can, Mozart describes the end of Figaro’s second act, where a duet gradually builds up to an octet. A series of mishaps leads to a giant argument, with each character voicing their own frustrations. Infectiously high on his own genius, Mozart animatedly describes how he’s able to pull it off. “Imagine,” he beseeches the emperor, “the longest time that such a thing can be sustained, and then double it!”
Mozart has absolutely no chill; he’s so pleased with himself that he can barely keep from jumping up and down. His eyes gleam, and of course, there’s that giggle. But the scene is Hulce’s tour-de-force because we see both the genius and the man. Mozart’s gleeful egotism is immediately followed by states of grace and some of the “unfulfillable longing” that Salieri finds in his music. He describes the opera’s opening scene, where Figaro and his fiancée happily prepare for their wedding. With a sweet warmth, he envisions his characters not just as vehicles for vocal pyrotechnics, but as fully human.
On opening night, the wondrous chorus sends Salieri reeling. “I heard,” he says in voice-over “the music of true forgiveness filling the theater, conferring on all who sat there perfect absolution.” Onscreen, Abraham’s expression is extraordinary: we see joy and sour jealousy warring on the planes of his hangdog face. It’s a perfect little portrait of agony and ecstasy–an encapsulation of a film that explicates and mystifies genius in equal measure.
“Amadeus” is available for digital rental or purchase.
