Word: salieri
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...