Amadeus (1984) Review
9/10
An old man in an asylum confesses to murdering Mozart. Almost nothing that follows is historically true and the film doesn’t care, because it’s not about Mozart. It’s about Antonio Salieri, a man of real ability who has been given just enough talent to recognize greatness in another person and not enough to produce it. That’s the cruelest arrangement available and the film knows exactly what it’s found.
Peter Shaffer adapted his own stage play, and the change from stage to screen mostly consisted of adding the music as an active participant instead of a subject.
No other film makes me feel this much sympathy for a man being eaten alive by his own good taste. Abraham plays Salieri’s envy like an open wound, and I find myself on his side even while he’s plotting against the most gifted man in Vienna. That’s a hard trick, and the film pulls it off for two hours and forty minutes.
The 9 is for a character who ranks among the best-written in film and a construction that gets richer the more you know about the actual history. The court intrigue sags in the middle and the theatrical cut runs two hours and forty minutes. Neither matters much against what F. Murray Abraham is doing.
The Curse of Being Good Enough
Salieri doesn’t lack talent. He’s the court composer to the Holy Roman Emperor, successful, respected across Europe, and able. His operas were performed and admired. His tragedy is that he’s just enough to hear what Mozart is doing and understand exactly how far beyond him it is. He’s the only person at that court equipped to perceive it, and the perception destroys him.
The manuscript scene is the whole film in four minutes. Constanze brings him Mozart’s original scores to secure a position, and Salieri reads them and finds no corrections. Not one. Mozart was writing down music that already existed complete in his head, and Salieri understands what that means while nobody else in the building could.
The camera stays on Abraham’s face while the music rises on the soundtrack, which is the film’s central technique: we hear what he hears, and we watch it cost him. That shot of Abraham’s face is the heart of the film for me. He’s reading perfection off the page and you can watch it killing him. I don’t know a better piece of acting about envy.
A man with no ear would have been spared. A man with more talent would have been a rival. Shaffer placed Salieri at the exact point of maximum suffering, and he did it deliberately.
The other half of the arrangement is that Mozart is vulgar. He giggles, he’s crude, he’s financially incompetent and socially impossible, and Salieri can’t reconcile the vessel with the contents. His complaint is against God for the choice of instrument.
The most painful position in any story is proximity without possession, and it’s chronically underused. A character who can’t see what they’re missing is comic. A character who sees it exactly, in detail, with full technical understanding, and can’t reach it, is tragic.
The construction requires you to give your antagonist real competence, which writers resist because it makes the protagonist’s advantage harder to justify. Salieri has to be good, and the film has to show it, or his judgment of Mozart carries no weight and the whole structure collapses. When he says the music is perfect, we believe him because we’ve heard his own work and it’s decent.
So when you build an envious character, spend the pages establishing their real ability first. The reader must agree that this person is qualified to make the comparison. Envy from an incompetent is a character flaw; envy from an expert is an argument about the universe.
The Narrator Is Not Reliable
Salieri claims to have killed Mozart, and the film presents the confession as fact within its own frame while giving you every reason to doubt it. Historically the two men were on cordial terms. Salieri taught Mozart’s son. The alleged confession came very late, in an asylum, from a man in mental and physical decline, and there’s no evidence of anything beyond ordinary professional rivalry.
So everything you watch is filtered through a jealous, dying, possibly deluded man constructing himself a role in a story he was largely peripheral to. He’d rather be Mozart’s murderer than his footnote, and the film understands that this is a recognizable human preference.
The masked commission for the Requiem is the clearest fabrication and the best invention. It never happened. It’s also the perfect expression of what Salieri wants: to be secretly essential to the greatest work, unacknowledged, the hidden author of the thing that killed him. The last line, in which he absolves all mediocrities and blesses them, is a man appointing himself patron saint of a category so that he’s at least the head of something. Abraham won the Academy Award over Tom Hulce, who was nominated for the same film. That’s a neat piece of accidental commentary.
The Music Makes the Argument
The film explains what makes the music great by showing it in use instead of describing it. That’s the hardest thing to do in any medium about any art.
Salieri narrates over the Serenade for Winds, telling you exactly what to listen for: the bassoons, the basset horns, the single oboe line that he describes as unfolding. And you hear it, because the piece is playing while he speaks and he’s pointed at the right moment.
That sequence is the best writing about music I know of in a film, and the reason it works is that the analysis is specific, technical, and delivered by somebody qualified to give it. Nobody says the music is beautiful. He says what it does.
The Requiem sequence near the end turns composition into a physical process. Mozart dictates, Salieri transcribes, the two of them argue about voicing, and the music assembles on the soundtrack in the order it’s being described. It’s the best scene about creative work in any film I’ve seen.
Neville Marriner conducted the whole score on the condition that not a note of Mozart be altered. That’s why the music holds up as music instead of film scoring. Hulce and Abraham both learned to fake conducting and keyboard technique convincingly enough that musicians don’t wince. That’s rarer than it should be.
Writing about art usually produces adjectives, and adjectives are the failure mode. Beautiful, haunting, transcendent: none of them tell a reader anything, because they report a reaction instead of describing an object. The method here’s to have a qualified character point at specifics while the work is present. That’s available in prose too, though it takes more nerve. Describe the mechanism, not the effect: what the third line does that the second didn’t, where the pattern breaks, which choice was available and rejected.
The test is whether a reader who doesn’t share your character’s taste would still understand what they’re claiming. Salieri’s account of the Serenade is checkable. You can go and listen and find the oboe line. If your character’s assessment of a painting or a book or a piece of music can’t be verified against the object, you’ve written a mood instead of a judgment.
Mozart as Written
Tom Hulce’s performance was criticized at the time for the giggle and it’s the most misunderstood choice in the film.
The giggle is the choice I’d point to if anybody asked me why this film works. It grates, it’s meant to grate, and Salieri’s horror only makes sense if the man who wrote the Serenade also laughs like a donkey at a party. Shaffer took it from surviving letters. Mozart’s correspondence is crude, full of scatological jokes and puns, written by a man who was funny in a juvenile way and entirely unbothered about it. The vulgarity is in the record.
What the film adds is the collision between that and the work. Hulce plays a man who’s silly in every room he enters and completely serious the moment he’s working, and the switch happens without transition. He giggles at a joke and then dictates four bars.
That’s what Salieri can’t forgive. Not the talent, which he could have borne, but that the talent arrived inside somebody with no apparent gravity, no discipline of manner, no evident suffering. God chose a fool as the instrument, and Salieri’s complaint is a theological one.
Hulce also learned enough keyboard to play the passages convincingly, practicing four hours a day, and his conducting was coached to the point where the movements match the score. The seriousness of the preparation is invisible and it’s what makes the silliness land. The scene where he’s dying and can’t stop working, dictating the Confutatis while unable to sit up, is the film’s answer to its own question. The gravity was there. It was just never in the room where anybody was looking.
Why It Is Not a Biography
People still object to the historical liberties, and the objection misses what the film is doing. It’s a confession by an unreliable narrator, framed as such, in which the historical record is the thing being distorted in front of you.
The real Mozart wasn’t murdered, wasn’t poor at the end in the way the film suggests, and was buried in a common grave because that was standard practice in Vienna at the time instead of because he died destitute and unmourned. Shaffer built the story from one durable rumor and one real emotional truth: most people who work in an art form spend their lives near somebody better and have to decide what to do about it.
The film’s actual subject is professional envy among competent people. That’s why it connects with writers, musicians, painters and anybody who has been in a room with talent they can’t match. Milos Forman shot it in Prague because Vienna had modernized and Prague still had eighteenth-century streets and the Count Nostitz theater, where Don Giovanni had premiered. So some of the performance scenes happen in the actual room. The director’s cut adds twenty minutes, including a scene where Constanze offers herself to Salieri and he humiliates her. It’s stronger material and it makes the film longer than most people want it.
Should you watch Amadeus?
Yes, and watch the theatrical cut first at two hours forty.
Don’t go in expecting history. Go in expecting the best film ever made about being the second most talented person in the room, a spot most of us know well and few films bother with. It stops at a 9 only because the court intrigue sags in the middle, and I’d forgive far worse for F. Murray Abraham’s face in that manuscript scene.
