Amadeus is the best film of the 80’s. I totally understand anyone who would want to make a case for Raging Bull, E.T., The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Do the Right Thing, The Shining, or Platoon (which we’ll get to in a couple of weeks). Those are all excellent films, and there are many other excellent films that were released during the 80’s that could be considered as the decade’s best. AFI has Amadeus ranked #53 on its original Top 100, and it was the 3^rd highest ranking for an 80’s film behind Raging Bull (#24) and E.T. (#25). But I part company with AFI once again here, as for my money, Amadeus separates itself from every other film of the decade by being the complete package.

Amadeus has it all. It has an exquisitely written screenplay with dialogue that is written like poetry. There is subtext throughout with many examples of Mozart (Tom Hulce) naively insulting the Court Composer Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) over and over until nearly the end. It has characters with layer upon layer of depth and they are all stripped bare by the end. The production design of Amadeus was created with the meticulous care of one of Mozart’s operas and the same can be said for the costume design. And the acting. What can one say about the acting except that it is superb?

One of the aspects of this film that I find so appealing, and also that make it fairly unique is the fact that Salieri is the protagonist of the film, but also the film’s villain. In typical villain fashion, Salieri is the Hero of his own story, but it is his desire to thwart Mozart at every turn, and that desire and passion eventually grow through his jealousy to a homicidal level. I find the character of Salieri to be one of the most intriguing characters that I’ve ever seen in cinema. He narrates the story to us through his older self after his guilt drives him to a failed attempt at suicide. Salieri is a pious man who firmly believes that God gave him the gift of creating music so that Salieri could bring glory to Him. Salieri’s desire is to be the world’s most renowned composer for that reason, or so he would have us believe. Salieri, in fact believes that he’s doing God’s work when he becomes Court Composer for Emperor Joseph II of Austria. Enter Mozart. Salieri has heard of him and knows that he has gifts that may even exceed his own. But when he sees that Mozart is a cavorting womanizing clown, he can’t believe that the talent is true. After hearing a concerto, he conceded its brilliance but figures that it must have been luck more than anything and determines that Mozart is nothing more than a fluke. However when Mozart’s wife Constantine brings Salieri samples of his music to apply on his behalf for students, Salieri sees the brilliance in it immediately. He knows that this man is composing on a level to which Salieri has always aspired but will never be able to attain. What’s more, Salieri starts to resent God for giving these abilities not to one who has devoted his life and given all credit to Him, but to one who lives a life of frivolity and excess and who seems to not respect at all the talent that he has been given.

What director Milos Forman and screenwriter Peter Shaffer did with Salieri was brilliant. They created a character that has devoted himself to two things: God and music. We learn very early in the film that those two things are intertwined in his life as to make one inseparable from the other. He believes that God has put him on this Earth to make beautiful music and he creates this music to bring pleasure to God. It is obvious to Salieri that God would surely make him the greatest composer in the world. Unfortunately for Salieri, that’s not the way God works. Of course when Salieri meets this boorish, childish little man who is nevertheless able to take a piece of music that Salieri labored over to make as fine as he could, and then not only play it from memory after only hearing it once, but then improve on it several times over in a matter of minutes, it’s not a wonder that Salieri would think that God was mocking him. It’s not surprising then, that he would tell God that they are now enemies, and his whole purpose in life now is to belittle and destroy Mozart so that no one will hear his music.

For his part, Mozart was a lovable rogue. The role would be a signature one for Tom Hulce, and the recognizable laugh would be one of the signature motifs of the film. It made him stand out from the rest of the characters in several ways. First of all, it was inappropriately loud, so men of certain social standing would be put off by it because it showed him to be less sophisticated than they. It made Mozart approachable. There are many reasons that this film should be required viewing for any aspiring screenwriter, but one of the biggest reasons is for how Shaffer made Mozart relatable. In the character of Mozart we have a man who was by all accounts a genius. He had perhaps the greatest musical mind of any person to ever walk the earth and he was a man of the European elite of the 18^th Century. How in the world could an audience seeing this film more than 200 years after his death relate to him? One of the ways would be to give him a funny laugh. It might sound ridiculous on the surface, but what better way to humanize a character, and bring him to a more relatable level than by making him sound funny or nervous when he laughs.

The other thing that Forman and Shaffer did to effectively humanize Mozart was they gave him faults. The whole point of this story is the crux between how such an imperfect man could create such perfect music. And make no mistake, Forman and Shaffer’s Mozart was an imperfect man to be sure. He was a worldly man who was easily seduced by worldly pleasures. He was not necessarily a man who practiced infidelity, as he was never shown to be unfaithful to his wife, at least as it applies to relations with other women. Mozart was certainly addicted to partying and drinking, but he never seemed to allow those vices to affect his work, at least in terms of writing his symphonies. These vices did, however, sometimes prevent him from procuring work, and would eventually drive his wife away.

Here is one other thing in relation to the character of Mozart that Forman and Shaffer did that was so effective in making Mozart not only relatable, but also likable. They not only gave him faults that humanized him, but they also gave him vulnerability. Not unlike Salieri, Mozart was a man who needed approval. Whereas Salieri looked for approval from the Emperor and from God, Mozart desperately needed approval from his father. That is a need that many, many people have and it helps garner sympathy for Mozart as the film goes on, and that need for his father’s approval and ultimately forgiveness end up being used against him as weapons by Salieri. That is brilliant storytelling when one character takes another characters greatest need and uses it against him. It’s especially brilliant in a story like this that is told from the point of view of the villain, and he’s using the weakness of the Hero against him.

One other character component that is important to mention is also very prevalent in Amadeus, and that is the character arc. One thing that Salieri’s villainous behavior does is make ironically make Mozart into a better, more responsible person. Even as Salieri deceives Mozart into thinking that he’s helping him, at times he unwittingly does, even as Mozart unwittingly continues to insult him. And yet, even as he has Mozart right where he wants him, when Mozart desperately needs his help, Salieri is ever the artist and assists Mozart in completing his requiem. He becomes a part of Mozart’s genius and sees it from the inside. But then, through his own doing, Mozart dies and the glory eludes him. Naturally, he blames his misfortune yet again on God. He seemed to be coming to the point where he finally had the ability to appreciate Mozart’s genius. In fact, he actually does reach that point just as it is taken from him by Mozart’s passing. It is a wonderful character arc that regresses, grows and then regresses again.

This brings me to the theme of this film, which is that life isn’t fair and no amount of jealousy or vindictiveness will make it so. Whether in art, music or business, there will be people that have to give 100% effort 100% of the time just to get by. And then there will be those other people who have a natural affinity or a God-given talent for the work. Life just comes a lot easier to those people, and there is nothing that we can do about it. I feel that what Forman and Shaffer were saying in this film is that those people should be celebrated or at the very least appreciated. Envy is an ugly state to be in and it has the potential to bring out the worst in all of us, just as it did in Salieri. The film is telling us that instead of feeling this envy towards another’s natural gifts, we should revel in them with those people. We should feel blessed to be in the presence of greatness rather than attempting to stifle it or hoping for its ruin. This type of greatness doesn’t come around very often, so it should be celebrated when it does.

With those thematic qualities and the performances of the actors and the overall craftsmanship of the filmmaking, I feel like Amadeus is very much a thinking person’s film without crossing into the realm of being pretentious. I’m sure that the air of pretense has kept people from seeing this film, and I can say confidently that it is not a pretentious film in the least. The overall humanization of the characters and the very basic thematic elements keep it from becoming the pretentious film that many period pieces are, especially when they have to do with opera and classical music. If you have never seen Amadeus, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Don’t be afraid of the fact that it’s a period piece about classical music. Embrace the fact that it’s an outstanding, entertaining film that you can enjoy and savor.

Did the Academy get it right?

Yes they did. I feel it was the best film of the decade, so surely it was the best film of the year, although it did have some relatively stiff competition, especially from The Killing Fields, which was a powerful film about a journalist covering the civil war in Cambodia that came on the heels of the United States pulling out of Vietnam and the surrounding region. Things go from bad to worse when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge take over and systematically kill more than 2 million of their own citizens. Even though Amadeus is hardly uplifting, it’s entirely possible that The Killing Fields was just too heavy and depressing of a film to take home the top prize. Plus, Amadeus is just better. The other films up for Best Picture in 1984 were A Passage to India, Places in the Heart and A Soldier’s Story, with the latter two films dealing with themes of racism, both institutional and personal, and the former being the final film of David Lean. They were all excellent films in their own rights, but none of them were to the standard of Amadeus, which was the best film of 1984 and the best film of the entire decade.