AMADEUS (65)

Directed by: Milos Forman (1984)

Starring: F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge, Jeffrey Jones

The Pitch: Near the end of his life, 18th-century composer Antonio Salieri - once acclaimed, but always mediocre - tells the story of his relationship with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a genius with the mind of a vulgar child.

Theo Sez: Spectacle with brains, but you get the feeling Forman and Co. were so thrilled to manage such a rare combination they never bothered going the extra step to make everything cohere : there's what you might call a spiritual layer of allegory (Mozart as a symbol of God's perversity, turning the devout Salieri into a blasphemer) and a political layer of allegory (Mozart as a revolutionary force, tying in with the imminent French Revolution that's always just offscreen - writing music a vaudeville audience understands better than a King, moving away from the "old dead legends") and the two seem to run in parallel, never coming together, complicated by the fact that the former exists entirely in Salieri's head while the latter has nothing to do with him at all (he's never coded as One Of Them, using the ancien regime only as it suits his purposes). Starts to sag after a while, especially with stolid Forman at the helm but also because nothing's really developing - emphasis shifts to Mozart about halfway through (the maid a device to disguise the fact that Salieri himself isn't really a witness to the goings-on), which a wittier director might've played as a joke (Salieri's own story getting hijacked as he tells it!) but here results only in a sense of two shorter films bunched together in an (over)long one ; even the genuinely exhilarating climax, highlighting the tale's strongest irony - that the two men are in fact soulmates, inexorably linked by the power of music - peters out a bit in talk of "God's revenge", belatedly linking back to a strand that's barely featured in the film's second half (a better ending, historical accuracy aside, might've been for Salieri to get the "Requiem" in his hands but realise, in a final bow to their common Muse, that he couldn't possibly claim this work of genius as his own). Too much time left over to ponder niggly little annoyances, like Mozart's potty mouth pretty much disappearing after the shock of the first scene (wouldn't dare make genius too unsympathetic? or would too much vulgarity have scared away the middlebrow audience?) ; still handsome and intelligent, full of glorious music and occasionally justifying its high reputation. Whatever happened to Elizabeth Berridge, anyway?...