Last night I watched Shaffer's film Amadeus for the first time and I absolutely loved it. I'm not usually a fan of historical dramas and novels due to the well known proclivity of directors to take the few sources and facts about the period we have, embellish half of them beyond recognisability and then chuck the other half away in order to make room for more sex scenes. However, knowing next to nothing about eighteenth century Vienna or Mozart's biography I could easily ignore whatever historical inaccuracies there were and enjoy the movie.
So what did I like about it? The acting was great. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce were especially good, although I also enjoyed Jeffrey Jones' 'Joseph II' until he gradually faded out of the story towards the end. It was undeniably a long film with a running time of 2 hours and 50 minutes. However, the humour and strong characters helped to ensure that the story never slowed down enough to become boring. Every scene set up the next and there were no unnecessary side plots or distractions from the central narrative. The music was, of course, exceptional and brilliantly used to show how Mozart's life impacted on his work or to provide suspense and bombast when the story required it.
I also enjoyed the complexity of the main theme as I saw it - the contrasting insanities of Salieri and Mozart. The more obvious degeneration in the movie was Mozart's descent from a spoilt and abrasive newcomer at court to a pale and ill drunkard. Salieri is the jealous and machiavellian figure behind the scenes who ensures that Mozart, despite his success, never receives clients or full recognition. The stress of poverty despite constant hard work and lack of acknowledgement of his genius by others eventually drives Mozart to an exhausted death. His relationship with Salieri is where the young German's naivety is most obvious. His early successes in earning the Emperor's favour and getting around inconvenient imperial censorship are achieved by his clear enthusiasm and genius. However, he is no politician and can only recognise the most obvious of his opponents among the Emperor's advisers. He goes to his grave believing that Salieri is his friend and advocate when in fact the Italian has been doing all he can to undermine and destroy Mozart.
However, the structure of the movie means that even as Salieri seems to triumph over his younger rival we know that this his victory will bring him insanity and degeneration instead of satisfaction. The film opens with his attempted suicide and internment in a mental asylum where he tells the story of Mozart's death to a nervous looking priest. Throughout his recollection of the episode Salieri is obviously conscious that he destroyed something beautiful - the 'voice of God' that he heard in Mozart's compositions. Even as he sabotaged the man's career he couldn't help himself from attending and admiring his music and operas. Knowing himself to be a mediocrity, albeit one that had succeeded in attaining prestige and critical acclaim, he could not bear to see the talent that had been denied him embodied in the vain and braying figure of Mozart.
It is this respect for genius that subsequently leads to Salieri's own madness and attempted suicide. This degeneration cannot simply be blamed on his guilt at what he did to Mozart. Early on in the film we are shown that Salieri is comfortable with the idea of a 'necessary' death. His father was a humourless businessman who opposed the idea of a composer's career for his son. It was only with his accidental death that Salieri could travel to Vienna and begin his ascent to the post of Imperial Kapellmeister. The callousness with which Salieri talks about his father's death and refers to it as a 'miracle' disillusions us of any thought that he is squeamish about using the deaths of others to further his own ends. While Salieri is often an unpleasant character, in his persecution of Mozart he was driven far more by his love of music as an expression of divinity than by base jealousy. He cannot stand having extinguished a talent greater than his own and this leads to his own attempted suicide for which he is put in a mental asylum.
That's my interpretation of the point of the film anyway. Salieri is nothing if not an unreliable narrator and as I said above I have very little independent knowledge of the period or characters involved so take it all with a pinch of salt.
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