His patron, Emperor Joseph II ( Jeffrey Jones) passes strict rules (no ballet in operas!) but cannot enforce them because, God love him, he enjoys what he would forbid. His father Leopold ( Roy Dotrice) trained the child genius to amaze the courts of Europe, but now stands aside, disapproving, at the untidy mess Mozart has made of his adulthood. The flower child Mozart tries to govern his life, unsuccessfully, by the lights of three older men. There is something about Mozart's Vienna apartment, especially toward the end, that reminds you of the pad of a newly-rich rock musician: The rent is sky-high, the furnishings are sparse and haphazard, work is scattered everywhere, housekeeping has been neglected, there are empty bottles in the corners, and the bed is the center of life.
They have just the slightest suggestion of punk, just the smallest shading of pink.
In a film where everybody wears wigs, Mozart's wigs (I noted in my original review) do not look like everybody else's. The key precursor is "Hair." He sees Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a spiritual brother of the hippies who thumbed their noses at convention, muddled their senses with intoxicants, and delighted in lecturing their elders. Forman, a Czech filmmaker who turned his back on the Russians and came to work in America, but not exactly in Hollywood, had directed "Cuckoo's Nest" (1975), " Hair" (1981) and " Ragtime" (1984). Zaentz's pattern, as you can see, is to take literary successes that seem unfilmable-too ambitious, too specialized-and film them. "Amadeus" was brought forth by the independent producer Saul Zaentz (" One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," " The Unbearable Lightness of Being," " The English Patient"), who brought Peter Shaffer's play and assigned the playwright to adapt it with the director Milos Forman. Salieri could strain and moan and bring forth tinkling jingles Mozart could compose so joyously that he seemed, Salieri complained, to be "taking dictation from God." It is as true in every field compare Shakespeare to Shaw, Jordan to Barkley, Picasso to Rothko, Kennedy to Nixon. Almost-great writers (Mann, Galsworthy, Wolfe) make it look like Herculean triumph. Great writers (Nabokov, Dickens, Wodehouse) make it look like play. This is not a vulgarization of Mozart, but a way of dramatizing that true geniuses rarely take their own work seriously, because it comes so easily for them. The movie's success is partly explained, I think, by its strategy of portraying Mozart not as a paragon whose greatness is a burden to us all, but as a goofy proto-hippie with a high-pitched giggle, an overfondness for drink, and a buxom wife who liked to chase him on all fours. When you consider that 98 percent of the American public never listens to a classical music station, it is astonishing that Mozart became for a time a best-seller, and not only to women assured by talk-show gurus that his music boosted the IQs of embryos. "Amadeus" (1984) swept the Academy Awards and had a considerable popular success. True, Salieri plans to claim the work as his own-but for a man like him, that will be one more turn of the screw. Salieri hates Mozart but loves music more, and cannot live without yet one more work that he can resent for its perfection. This scene is moving not because Mozart is dying, but because Salieri, his lifelong rival, is striving to extract from the dying man yet another masterpiece that will illuminate how shabby Salieri's work is.
#Amadeus awards movie#
The most moving scene in the movie takes place at Mozart's deathbed, where the great composer, only 35, dictates the final pages of his great "Requiem" to Salieri, sitting at the foot of the bed with quill and manuscript, dragging the notes from Mozart's fevered brain. Others must fail." Milos Forman's "Amadeus" is not about the genius of Mozart but about the envy of his rival Salieri, whose curse was to have the talent of a third-rate composer but the ear of a first-rate music lover, so that he knew how bad he was, and how good Mozart was. They vote with Gore Vidal and David Merrick, both credited with saying, "It is not enough that I succeed. Happy people are pleased by the happiness of others.
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