TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/84/84moz47

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 8.9 KB | 169 lines

                                                                                September 10, 1984

CINEMA

Mozart's Greatest Hit


From an unfilmable play, a grand movie entertainment


If mediocrity is the natural condition of humankind, then genius
is the purest and rarest of diseases. Tortured writers,
earless painters, mad scientists all live inside the quarantine
of their own superiority, distanced by their difference from the
world they illuminate and help re-create. To 19th century
romantics the genius was a superman; to most of us today he may
seem both more and less than human, an idiot savant, a freak of
nature.

To Antonio Salieri, the 18th century Italian composer whom
Peter Shaffer resurrected in fictional form for his 1979 play
Amadeus, one peculiar genius was even more frightening:  a
precious gift and a malicious joke from God. The creature's
name was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart -- "Spiteful, sniggering,
conceited, infantine Mozart!" as the play's Salieri, his
contemporary and rival, calls him. "I had heard a voice of
God," the Italian mutters after listening to a Mozart adagio,
"and it was the voice of an obscene child!"  Salieri carried a
double curse:  to appreciate beyond pain or pleasure Mozart's
genius and to realize that his disease was incommunicable.

As staged by Peter Hall, first at Britain's National Theater and
then for long runs in London and on Broadway, Shaffer's play was
an eloquent tragicomedy swathed in theatrical sorcery. Events
in the crisscrossing lives of the two composers were summoned
up as spirits -- real, distorted or imagined -- out of the
crumbling mind of Salieri, a man convinced that he had murdered
Mozart. Weaving Mozartian facts into the Salieri fantasy,
Shaffer conceived his play uniquely for the stage. Surely there
was no reason, no excuse for turning it into a film.

Milos Forman found a reason. The director of One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest saw a way to retain the play's intellectual
breadth and formal audacity without betraying the movie medium's
demand for matter of fact naturalism. And he persuaded Shaffer,
who had been disappointed by film adaptations of his plays,
including The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Equus, to write the
Amadeus screenplay, reshaping Amadeus from a madman's memory
play to a more realistic musical biography. Recalls Shaffer:
"It was like having the same child twice."

Amadeus the film dramatizes nearly all the major events in the
last decade of Mozart's 35 years. His music, which in the play
served only as an allusive ostinato, seizes center screen with
significant excerpts from four Mozart operas, several concerti
and the Requiem. As seen through the dealer's eye of the movie
camera, Salieri looks like a sullen midget next to a Mozart
monument; he is Judas to Mozart's Jesus, James Earl Ray to his
Martin Luther King Jr., Bob Uecker to his Babe Ruth. Explains
Shaffer:  "Salieri had to give way just a bit to make room for
the glory and wonder of his victim's achievement."

The result is a grand, sprawling entertainment that incites
enthrallment for much of its 2 hr. 38 min. Shaffer's
screenplay retains many of the play's epigrammatic fulminations,
deftly synopsizes whole sections, transforms Mozart's father
from a hectoring apparition to an on-screen tyrant, and provides
a thrilling new climax in which the dying Mozart dictates his
Requiem to a Salieri racked with guilt, jealousy and awe. If
the operatic excerpts occasionally impede dramatic flow, they
capture the Mozartian spirit as well as comment, with typical
Forman bravura, on the theme of an oaf who makes miracles with
music:  in the Don Giovanni parody, a dove flies out of a
horse's ass.

For Forman, returning to his native Czechoslovakia for his first
film there since 1968, Amadeus marks a sure step forward in
dramatic and visual storytelling. Defeated by his two previous
challenges -- turning the Love Generation Hair into a Viet Nam
elegy and compressing the epic misanthropy of E.L. Doctorow's
novel Ragtime -- the director has come to some sensitive
compromises with narrative reality. Mozart sings the music of
God, Salieri schemes and screams in tragic register, and the
film keeps humming merrily along with them both.

This Amadeus dares to pose the riddle of genius in the form of
a traditional celebrity bio pic. In 1781 Mozart (Tom Hulce),
once the put-upon prodigy of musical Europe, comes at the age
of 26 to the Viennese court of Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II
(played with a sly, thin smile and a delicious air of cagey
indecisiveness by Jeffrey Jones). There the man of the moment
is Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham): court composer,
consummate technician and politician, Emperor's favorite, a
musical lion of Vienna. Most important, he knows his place, as
an educated servant among masters of the blood and the
bureaucracy. Mozart, fatally, does not.

So begins the artistic trajectory of surge, transcendence,
decline and early death. Mozart takes a lower-class wife
(Elizabeth Berridge, with the puffy, smooth face and black
button eyes of a rag doll left in grandma's attic), but
befuddles her with his excesses at work and play. He fights
with his possessive father (Roy Dotrice) and with the arbiters
of art in Joseph's court. He is a slave to fashion and passion.
His genius continues to consume him, like a virus he is unable
or unwilling to shake; at the first performance of The Magic
Flute he faints dead away at the piano. Portrait of the artist
as a great man:  while his wife and father bicker over money in
the next room, Mozart slumps over a billiard table, takes a
swig of wine and fleshes out Ah tutti contenti from The Marriage
of Figaro, creating music of domestic ecstasy out of the discord
of his family life.

Salieri stands to the side during all this, stage-managing
Mozart's downfall, then appearing to the fevered young man in
his dead father's disguise and commissioning the Requiem.
Similarly, the two main actors, chosen from a thousand who
auditioned for the roles, must follow different circuits to
their roles. Hulce, who may be remembered by movie fans as the
prime nerd in National Lampoon's Animal House, must stride
on-screen as a fop manque, pinwheeling his arrogance, before the
audience can find the obsession at the core of his genius.
Hulce prepared for the role by practicing piano four hours a
day. "After that," he says, "all I felt like doing was dancing
and drinking all night -- just like Mozart."  In a daring,
powerful performance, this boy with the map of White Water,
Wis., stamped on his face soon convinces the viewer that he is
the pagan saint of classical music.

Hulce's Mozart bears the familiar Forman trademark. The
director always seems to be telling his actors:  Go bigger, dare
more, fill the biggest moviehouse with your passion and
technique. Abraham's challenge as Salieri was more daunting.
He must be all smoldering menace, a dandy in smirking repose
-- until, one day, he scans some scribbled Mozart sheet music,
and tears of astonishment and fury course down his cheeks. Says
Abraham, who has played in everything from Shakespeare to
Scarface to a leotarded leaf in the Fruit of the Loom TV spots:
"Salieri is a figure tragic in Greek proportions because he
enters into a competition with God."  Forman says he chose these
two off-Broadway journeymen over stars, or over actors who had
performed in the play, because "I wanted to believe that this
person is Mozart, is Salieri, not just an actor playing a part."
Believe who will. The fact remains that Hulce and Abraham move
assuredly to the center of this glittery production, finding the
souls of their characters and then, at the film's climax,
exchanging them.

One wonders:  Can this galloping metaphysical thriller find an
audience?  For the vast majority of today's moviegoers, the
18th century is far more remote than the sci-fi 25th; Salieri
is a loser from Loserville; and Mozart, he's the guy who wrote
Elvira Madigan, and his first name is Mostly, isn't it?  The
film's $18 million budget may be less than is spent on many a
teen-pic flop, but it still makes Amadeus a ricochet roll of the
dice; the film will have to bring in more than $40 million at
the box office just to break even.

To mention these commercial risks, though, is to take a
Hapsburg Emperor's narrow view of art's bottom line. Amadeus
may be a popular film for the same reason it is a good one:  it
paints, in vibrant strokes, an image of the artist as romantic
hero. The textbook Mozart, embalmed in immortality, comes
raucously alive as a punk rebel, grossing out the Establishment,
confuting his chief rival, working himself to death in an effort
to put on paper songs no one else can hear. Who among us cannot
sympathize, even identify, with such an icon of iconoclasm?  In
real life we may all be Salieris, but we can respond to a movie
that tells us we are really Mozarts.

--By Richard Corliss.  Reported by Cristina Garcia/New York