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Salieri stands to the side during all this, stage-managing Mozart's downfall, then appearing to the fevered young man in his dead father's disguise and commissioning the Requiem. Similarly, the two main actors, chosen from a thousand who auditioned for the roles, must follow different circuits to their roles. Hulce, who may be remembered by movie fans as the prime nerd in National Lampoon's Animal House, must stride on-screen as a fop manqué, pinwheeling his arrogance, before the audience can find the obsession at the core of his genius. Hulce prepared for the role by practicing piano four hours a day. "After that," he says, "all I felt like doing was dancing and drinking all night—just like Mozart." In a daring, powerful performance, this boy with the map of White Water, Wis., stamped on his face soon convinces the viewer that he is the pagan saint of classical music.
Hulce's Mozart bears the familiar Forman trademark. The director always seems to be telling his actors: Go bigger, dare more, fill the biggest moviehouse with your passion and technique. Abraham's challenge as Salieri was more daunting. He must be all smoldering menace, a dandy in smirking repose—until, one day, he scans some scribbled Mozart sheet music, and tears of astonishment and fury course down his cheeks. Says Abraham, who has played in everything from Shakespeare to Scarface to a leotarded leaf in the Fruit of the Loom TV spots: "Salieri is a figure tragic in Greek proportions because he enters into a competition with God." Forman says he chose these two off Broadway journeymen over stars, or over actors who had performed in the play, because "I wanted to believe that this person is Mozart, is Salieri, not just an actor playing a part." Believe who will. The fact remains that Hulce and Abraham move assuredly to the center of this glittery production, finding the souls of their characters and then, at the film's climax, exchanging them.
One wonders: Can this galloping metaphysical thriller find an audience? For the vast majority of today's moviegoers, the 18th century is far more remote than the sci-fi 25th; Salieri is a loser from Loserville; and Mozart, he's the guy who wrote Elvira Madigan, and his first name is Mostly, isn't it? The film's $18 million budget may be less than is spent on many a teenpic flop, but it still makes Amadeus a ricochet roll of the dice; the film will have to bring in more than $40 million at the box office just to break even.
To mention these commercial risks, though, is to take a Hapsburg Emperor's narrow view of art's bottom line. Amadeus may be a popular film for the same reason it is a good one: it paints, in vibrant strokes, an image of the artist as romantic hero. The textbook Mozart, embalmed in immortality, comes raucously alive as a punk rebel, grossing out the Establishment, confuting his chief rival, working himself to death in an effort to put on paper songs no one else can hear. Who among us cannot sympathize, even identify, with such an icon of iconoclasm? In real life we may all be Salieris, but we can respond to a movie that tells us we are really Mozarts.
—By Richard Corliss. Reported by Cristina Garcia/New York