Word: mozarts
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...