(2 of 3)
The result is a grand, sprawling entertainment that incites enthrallment for much of its 2 hr. 38 min. Shaffer's screenplay retains many of the play's epigrammatic fulminations, deftly synopsizes whole sections, transforms Mozart's father from a hectoring apparition to an onscreen tyrant, and provides a thrilling new climax in which the dying Mozart dictates his Requiem to a Salieri racked with guilt, jealousy and awe. If the operatic excerpts occasionally impede dramatic flow, they capture the Mozartian spirit as well as comment, with typical Forman bravura, on the theme of an oaf who makes miracles with music: in the Don Giovanni parody, a dove flies out of a horse's ass.
For Forman, returning to his native Czechoslovakia for his first film there since 1968, Amadeus marks a sure step forward in dramatic and visual storytelling. Defeated by his two previous challenges—turning the Love Generation Hair into a Viet Nam elegy and compressing the epic misanthropy of E.L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime—the director has come to some sensitive compromises with narrative reality. Mozart sings the music of God, Salieri schemes and screams in tragic register, and the film keeps humming merrily along with them both.
This Amadeus dares to pose the riddle of genius in the form of a traditional celebrity bio pic. In 1781 Mozart (Tom Hulce), once the put-upon prodigy of musical Europe, comes at the age of 26 to the Viennese court of Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II (played with a sly, thin smile and a delicious air of cagey indecisiveness by Jeffrey Jones). There the man of the moment is Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham): court composer, consummate technician and politician, Emperor's favorite, a musical lion of Vienna. Most important, he knows his place, as an educated servant among masters of the blood and the bureaucracy. Mozart, fatally, does not.
So begins the artistic trajectory of surge, transcendence, decline and early death. Mozart takes a lower-class wife (Elizabeth Berridge, with the puffy, smooth face and black button eyes of a rag doll left in grandma's attic), but befuddles her with his excesses at work and play. He fights with his possessive father (Roy Dotrice) and with the arbiters of art in Joseph's court. He is a slave to fashion and passion. His genius continues to consume him, like a virus he is unable or unwilling to shake; at the first performance of The Magic Flute he faints dead away at the piano. Portrait of the artist as a great man: while his wife and father bicker over money in the next room, Mozart slumps over a billiard table, takes a swig of wine and fleshes out Ah tutti contenti from The Marriage of Figaro, creating music of domestic ecstasy out of the discord of his family life.