Mozart's Greatest Hit

By RICHARD CORLISS

From an unfilmable play, a grand movie entertainment

If mediocrity is the natural condition of humankind, then genius is the purest and rarest of diseases. Tortured writers, earless painters, mad scientists all live inside the quarantine of their own superiority, distanced by their difference from the world they illuminate and help-recreate. To 19th century romantics the genius was a superman; to most of us today he may seem both more and less than human, an idiot savant, a freak of nature.

To Antonio Salieri, the 18th century Italian composer whom Peter Shaffer resurrected in fictional form for his 1979 play Amadeus, one peculiar genius was even more frightening: a precious gift and a malicious joke from God. The creature's name was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart--"Spiteful, sniggering, conceited, infantine Mozart!" as the play's Salieri, his contemporary and rival, calls him. "I had heard a voice of God," the Italian mutters after listening to a Mozart adagio, "and it was the voice of an obscene child!" Salieri carried a double curse: to appreciate beyond pain or pleasure Mozart's genius and to realize that his disease was incommunicable.

As staged by Peter Hall, first at Britain's National Theater and then for long runs in London and on Broadway, Shaffer's play was an eloquent tragicomedy swathed in theatrical sorcery. Events in the crisscrossing lives of the two composers were summoned up as spirits--real, distorted or imagined--out of the crumbling mind of Salieri, a man convinced that he had murdered Mozart. Weaving Mozartian facts into the Salieri fantasy, Shaffer conceived his play uniquely for the stage. Surely there was no reason, no excuse for turning it into a film.

Milos Forman found a reason. The director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest saw a way to retain the play's intellectual breadth and formal audacity without betraying the movie medium's demand for matter of fact naturalism. And he persuaded Shaffer, who had been disappointed by film adaptations of his plays, including The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Equus, to write the Amadeus screenplay, reshaping Amadeus from a madman's memory play to a more realistic musical biography. Recalls Shaffer: "It was like having the same child twice."

Amadeus the film dramatizes nearly all the major events in the last decade of Mozart's 35 years. His music, which in the play served only as an allusive ostinato, seizes center screen with significant excerpts from four Mozart operas, several concerti and the Requiem. As seen through the dealer's eye of the movie camera, Salieri looks like a sullen midget next to a Mozart monument; he is Judas to Mozart's Jesus, James Earl Ray to his Martin Luther King Jr., Bob Uecker to his Babe Ruth. Explains Shaffer: "Salieri had to give way just a bit to make room for the glory and wonder of his victim's achievement."

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.

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 manque, 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

With reporting by Cristina Garcia