Last year marked the 40th anniversary of Amadeus (Forman, 1984) being released in cinemas worldwide. In keeping with the Irish tradition of being late to the party, the film has been finally rereleased across the country in a new 4K restoration. It is important to start by highlighting what this new restoration brings to the film as a spectacle. As you would expect with any new restoration, it brings a polish to the film both in terms of visuals and also sound where every creak of the floorboards or fingering of the piano brings with it a closer bond between audience and screen. This isn’t to say it takes away from the original film before the restoration. Like many musical artists who have also hopped on the restoration merry-go-round, I find myself enjoying the new polished sound that creates more of a sense of atmosphere to the music but also love to listen to the original sound that grounds it all back in reality.
It has been many years since I last enjoyed the wealth that the film has to offer, and what I remembered from it was the rockstar lifestyle that the film portrays Mozart (Tom Hulce) in the film, more in touch with the likes of The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle (Temple, 1980) or Breaking Glass (Gibson, 1980) which were released a few years earlier. The surroundings place you in a historic time that has no resonance with every day life, however Mozart’s characteristics in the film could place him in any modern punk band around the time of release where musical superiority is achieved through individual character and performance. In fact, Mozart’s wife (Elizabeth Berridge) is the only one who is remotely able to tame his frivolous lifestyle that is bringing down those close to him.
The film offered alot more from the outset than what I remembered from it. It is Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) who from the start becomes narrator of the events that unfold. He is the one in which we trust to give an accurate set of events for what happens as he is the only one that gives us an account into the life of Mozart. When the film starts with Salieri being incarcerated into a mental instution, you’d be foolish not to doubt the validity of the stories in which he’s telling you. Salieri’s failures are what drives the narrative throughout as it is from his perspective that the story is told. There are narrative tropes in which the audience can create a sense of reality within the story, but throughout it is always important to remember that the story is always from an individual perspective and emotions. This isn’t a unique take on a biographical musical film of course, recently Elvis (Luhrman, 2022) is told from the colonel’s perspective or take A Complete Unknown (Mangold, 2024) that is told more from the perspective of those who influenced Bob Dylan’s life rather than his own particular take on events. A film that contains biographical elements about an individual doesn’t necessarily succeed based upon its validity to life and reality, but rather in the same way that every film has to succeed by telling a compelling and narrative driven story about an individual. This film succeeds because you both revel in the greatness that an individual like Mozart can achieve, but also get swept up in the jealousy and contempt of Salieri and some of the other characters within the film. This is also what makes the film so great in my view. The talent of Mozart is portrayed so well within the film, but also you wouldn’t want anyone else to tell the story other than Salieri.
You do get elements within the story that bring it back to a sense of a true reality outside of Salieri’s emotions. In the same way that candlelight gives Barry Lyndon (Kubrick, 1975) the atsmospheric feel it does through the mise en scene. Amadeus does the opposite of this through the use of sound and in this case being the squeaky floorboards. The surroundings may be elegant and unattainable to most people past and present, the only constant outside of narrative that could both be seen in a rich or poor home at the time would be the sound of the floorboards and Amadeus doesn’t shy away from bringing a touch of realism to an unrealistic surrounding. This in itself isn’t the most striking part for me, it is more the parts in which this sound appears within the film. Early on this sound can be heard whenever there is movement within a scene, the further into the film you travel, however, the less this sound can be heard. I see this as intentional for the film where reality starts to leave everything connected with the film the further you go into it. Mozart loses touch on with reality the more his fame grows (a story as old as time with the rock/pop biopic), Salieri’s jealousy of him further enwraps his emotions and taints the timeline of events, and also just like the crescendo at the end of an opera, the end is the part in which progressive intensity leads to the most heightened point which is also the furthest away from the reality of the start.
I wouldn’t go to watch a biographical films in the cinema to get a true account of events, it is more about how telling the story of how people have been impacted by people around them rather than how people around them have impacted them. The film offers a story that transcends the time in which it was set, it uses universal themes like jealousy and superiority and plays it out between the two leading actors in a way that transcends the realities of the true story of Mozart and becomes more inwrapped in the emotions of Salieri’s life. Cinema is of course about emotion, and there is no better way of portraying this then by entangling the narrative in the emotions of the main antagonist within it.
