Sexy, ‘mad' and vulgar – Amadeus blows today's timid biopics out the water

Telegraph

2 days ago

Few music biopics these days provoke and prance like Miloš Forman's 1984 classic, Amadeus. Commercially, the genre may be in rude health – but it's not doing nearly so well creatively. It's stuck in a rut of nervous good taste. The problem is how few of these jukebox melodramas swing for the fences: their foremost goal is to be unobjectionable.
To be fair, plenty succeed in that – I found Timothée Chalamet's Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, easy to respect, if hard to love. Others fail, but not in an interesting way (take the Freddie Mercury fiasco Bohemian Rhapsody, which is scared, sanitised and as ugly as sin).
All of them suffer by comparison with Amadeus, winner of Best Picture, Best Director, and six other Oscars, which turned 40 last year and has just been restored in 4K, ahead of a nationwide re-release.
Dazzling and evergreen as Amadeus is, the idea that today's film-makers could learn from Forman's film is a tricky one, because it's in many ways an object lesson in how not to construct a biopic.
Take its core premise – that Mozart (Tom Hulce) was driven into his grave by the pathologically jealous court composer Antonio Salieri (F Murray Abraham). This is wildly speculative at best, and at worst, provably untrue. It comes from a rumour of poisoning that circulated after the former's death at 35, which resurfaced only when the senile Salieri caught wind of it while dying in a lunatic asylum. Yes, he made some delirious statements of culpability, but then recanted these when he was lucid.
Peter Shaffer, in his celebrated 1979 stage play, wasn't the first to supply a motive of intense envy that was more or less specious, and which he punched up into even greater antagonism when he wrote the film's script. He was inspired by an 1830 poetic drama by Alexander Pushkin called Mozart and Salieri, which had first popularised the idea of their rivalry, only five years after Salieri's death.
There was a thin factual basis for this: in the Viennese court of the 1780s, the pair would certainly have vied for attention and acclaim, but most evidence points to them collaborating amicably and becoming close friends as time went by. Salieri even tutored Mozart's son, Franz. The idea that he was a sad, eternal bachelor, who made a vow of celibacy to achieve elusive musical immortality, is wholly false: Salieri was married with eight children and a mistress.
'Over-the-top racket'
We don't come to Amadeus for historical accuracy, that's for sure. This is equally true of the heightened, hallucinatory effects achieved by Patrizia von Brandenstein's grand production design, with the doll-house tableaus it creates in drawing rooms; or by Theodor Pištěk's rococo costumes and intentionally creepy masks. And let's not forget the hair – Wolfgang's punk-rock pink wig, above all. This is pure fantasy. The real Mozart didn't like wigs, and avoided wearing them by styling his own hair to look like one.
Even by comparison to Shaffer's play, which legitimised the myth of this deadly rivalry, Forman's film could be accused of making an over-the-top racket. It caricatures Mozart, in Hulce's fabulously outré performance, as a giggling, infantile vulgarian, who woos his buxom future wife Constanze Weber (Elizabeth Berridge) using fart jokes.
This performance was the film's big risk, and in many ways the whole point. Not only did Shaffer lean into Mozart's absurd clowning for his script – the film is definitely more irreverent than the play, with much more colloquial dialogue – but Hulce claimed that he looked to none other than John McEnroe as a model for the composer's erratic mood swings and man-child essence.
Shaffer had set up a civilised tussle between genius and mediocrity on stage (Paul Scofield and Ian McKellen had been the first to play Salieri, with Simon Callow and Tim Curry as their respective Mozarts on the West End and Broadway stages). On film, with Forman's guidance, this escalated into uncouth combat, performed to the hilt. Mediocrity appears to win, but only in the feeble lifetime of this one man, Salieri.
Genius or nightmare?
In posterity, of course, Mozart's genius has the last laugh. Literally so, in fact. Salieri, who goes mad, becomes a self-styled 'patron saint of mediocrities', being wheeled around his asylum's corridors, while the exasperating giggle of Mozart rings around his head.
The play prowled this battleground using Shaffer's more formal rhetoric. But it's the film that ignites, seizing on the chance to play more than ever like an opera, and using the fresh recordings of at least 20 Mozart pieces that Neville Marriner made with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields.
It's Emperor Joseph II (a droll Jeffrey Jones) who complains to Mozart, in a much-quoted scene, of 'too many notes' at an opera premiere. If anyone was going to make a Mozart biopic with too few notes, it was unlikely to be Forman, who had brought a spirit of Czech rebellion to America with the likes of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and the protest musical Hair (1979). With Amadeus, he clearly wanted us to be bombarded – battered – by the composer's work, unleashing his genius on us in floods until we practically beg for mercy.
On screen, Salieri is helpless in this deluge. His own pieces don't stand a chance. And the aggravating personality of the younger man is pushed to a precipice where he (and we) can scarcely handle it.
With Shaffer's script doubling down, the film asks: what if Mozart was not only this much of a genius but also this much of a nightmare? Would it not have been tempting to poison him, and try to thwart his legacy? How did Salieri (who we're fairly sure resisted doing so) ever manage to restrain himself?
And so make-believe is allowed to trump reality, to serve the theme. Inhabited fearlessly by the Oscar-winning Abraham, who practically brings himself to climax looking at musical notation, Salieri becomes not just a bitter creep on the sidelines, but a strangely profound focus of identification for the audience. He can't help but remain obsessed with his rival's music, relishing the operas privately from his box, even while he has gone behind the scenes to ensure they'll flop. (Even Don Giovanni, which in reality was actually a wild success.)
'Art is divine, God is cruel, none of us are Mozart'
The film wants Salieri to sabotage Mozart far more than he ever did in real life. This is the dramatic licence it asks for. And that's all to the good – an accurate account of their relationship would surely have been rather dull. Poor Salieri, who had drifted into obscurity, would never be remembered without Amadeus, in any case. Reflected glory – which is better than zero glory – is all it can bestow upon him, and that has continued to last: a festival devoted to his work is even taking place in Vienna this year.
Amadeus itself has weathered phases of disrepute and stood tall. Both Baz Luhrmann (on Elvis) and Sofia Coppola (on Marie Antoinette) have pointed to it as a major influence, in helping them escape the fusty biopic trap.
On the other hand, the classical music establishment has often expressed purist disdain towards Forman's film, which seemingly peddled all these myths (wittily distorting reality, in fact) while bringing Mozart to the masses in the CD era. (Marriner's soundtrack was a #1 Billboard bestseller, one of the most popular classical recordings of all time.)
For many, it can't be forgiven as the film that gave Mozart his potty mouth and sent him downmarket. And yet the potty mouth was true: he wrote a six-voice canon in 1782 with the German lyrics 'Leck mich im Arsch'. ('Leck' is 'lick', and 'Arsch' means exactly what it sounds like.)
The vulgarity, the kitsch, and the inventions of Amadeus are absolutely crucial, or it would have been just another decorous snooze – a Salieri cantata of a film. It could never have committed so wholeheartedly to its statement: art is divine, God is cruel, none of us are Mozart. The film's gaudy ostentation is an attack on good taste – and one to rally behind. Would that everything these days wasn't so terrified of wigging out.
The 4K restoration of Amadeus is in cinemas July 25