Amadeus: The Director’s Cut Revisits Milos Forman’s Mozart Extravaganza. That’s All

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B+

Amadeus is back in movie theatres today, inasmuch as “theatres today” is still a thing, and it’s a grand lavish event of big wigs, rousing music, literary language, theatrical acting and a pulp fiction murder plot.

It definitely feels from a different era. I don’t mean the late-eighteenth century, where the period of the film’s release, but in the mid-80s, when prestige movies were both spectacular and literary.

Milos Forman’s adaptation of Peter Schaeffer’s stage play — about a fictional rivalry between composer Antoni Salieri and the genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the Austrian court — was one of those literary middle-brow extravaganzas that gave you your money’s worth of production values, in costumes, in elaborately staged operatic production numbers (Twyla Tharp contributed to the choreography), and the Prague-set court scenes.

Amadeus was re-released in 2002, adding 20 minutes that changed from a PG family movie to an R-rated “director’s cut.” The extras include more Mozart music and some bare breasts.

I wrote an unduly negative review of that film for The Globe and Mail in 2002. In my defense, it was a horrible screening, on a six-story IMAX screen, and the projectionist had shown the reels accidentally out of order.

Thus, Mozart’s wife angrily throws his father out of the house, and 40 minutes later, Mozart introduces her to his father for the first time. Although I’d seen Amadeus a couple of times (onstage and in film), it was challenging. As I wrote at the time, the effect was a little like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle while descending of a Ferris wheel.

On my latest viewing (on Blu-ray DVD at home), Amadeus worked much better, primarily as an enjoyable trip down middle-brow memory lane. Schaeffer’s script is, for most of its three-hour running time, a high-toned comedy, with a tragic kicker.

A framing device sees Salieri making a murder confession to a priest in a mental asylum, thus casting its veracity in doubt. He tells the story of his and Mozart’s intersecting lives in a series of flashbacks. The actor, F. Murray Abraham — whether wearing stiff aging make-up or as his more virile competitive younger self — steers the part with a poised, bitter wit.

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He won the best actor Academy Award for his performance, and the attention has kept him employed ever since.

Every time I see his handsome pock-marked face onscreen in some other richly sinister role (for example, as the black ops specialist Dar Adal in the series, Homeland), I think of the smoldering indignation of Salieri.

One trick of the script is that, while Mozart is the “obscene child” that God has chosen as the instrument of his divine voice, Salieri — the self-styled “patron saint of mediocrity” — is our representative in the film.

As Mozart — the guileless pop-star genius called “Wolfie” by his doting buxom bride (Elizabeth Berridge) — Tom Hulce is charmingly ridiculous until he becomes annoying and then, in the late scenes, pathos goes into overkill.

One takeaway may be that genius is too often wasted on the unworthy. After the movie ends, Mozart’s shrill whinny of a laugh will stay in your head even longer than the joyful lilt of “Eine kleine Nachtmusik.” In the film, it’s the last sound the envy-maddened Salieri hears.

Amadeus: The Director’s Cut. Directed by Milos Foreman. Written by Peter Schaeffer. Starring F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, and Elizabeth Berridge. Opens in select Cineplex theatres across Canada on November 20.