I've written several times here about great performances from various actors, including a couple of occasions where I felt that those actors deserved Oscars that went to others. This, however, is the first time I've written about a performance that actually did win an Oscar: F. Murray Abraham's win for his portrayal of Antonio Salieri.
Perhaps it's a bit presumptuous of me, but I'm totally with the Academy on this one. Abraham's performance really is masterful, particularly in the framing device, where he's an old man in an asylum (the makeup department deserves credit here, as well...Abraham looks great in those scenes). It's a tremendous performance, and would be worth watching the film for even if the rest was crap.
But of course it isn't; it's a great film top to bottom. Abraham stands out, but everything is near-perfect. The script was adapted from a play, one I've neither seen nor read. Based upon the inadequate research I did, the original play is just Salieri's confession; he tells the story to the audience, who never sees any of it. When Milos Forman, the great director, first took an interest in the play as a screen property he brought Peter Schaffer, the original playwright, in to write the screenplay, and it shows. There's a cohesion between the scenes that would have come straight from the play, and those enlarged to make scenes on film, that wouldn't have been there if Forman had brought in a writer more experienced with movies, but less so with the original work.
And those new scenes are enormous. The sets are gorgeous, from the Vienna streets to the Emporer's palace, Mozart's apartment, Salieri's home, and of course the great opera house. The opera scenes were filmed partly in the real opera house where Mozart's work was first performed, and partly in a set built to duplicate it but be more cinematic and easier to film in; those cuts are seamless, though. I can't tell which is which. And the cinematography is excellent. Every frame of this film is its own small masterpiece. Those scenes are towering, magnificent.
But then, of course, the film always comes back to that little room in the asylum, to the bitter old man of the original play. Those are the film's best moments, I think, the counterpoint to how big the rest of the movie is. It would be easy to get caught up in the enormity of the story, of the Hapsburg court and the life of one of the greatest men who ever lived, and yet it feels like these moments, between Salieri and his priest, are the real heart of the story. We would expect to sit back a bit and relax in those smaller scenes, but we can't. We're alone with Salieri and his memories and his vitriol and his still-burning envy. Abraham has a lot of charm in those scenes, but it's the devil's charm, corrupt and dangerous. In his mind, he waged war on God and, on the very edge of triumph, was finally defeated. And then, of course, he was left alive for decades to watch his own music fade into obscurity while Mozart came to be regarded as one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived. It has left him etched and twisted and beaten. Salieri sees himself as a devil and so we can't relax around him, because we don't know what he might still be capable of. You can see it on the face of the priest; he very much represents the audience, and we see our own horror in his eyes.
Abraham wasn't the only Oscar winner for this film. Forman took Best Director, and Schaffer got one for his screenplay. And the Academy respected how beautiful the film is, as well, with Oscars for Art Direction, Makeup, Sound, Costume Design, and of course Best Picture. All well-deserved, and I'm sorry that the editing and cinematography didn't win as well (both went to The Killing Fields, which I admit is not crap). And Tom Hulce also got nominated for his performance as Mozart; he was quite good, but he never had a chance to beat Abraham.
I should note that I watched the 2002 Director's Cut for this. There's about twenty minutes of added footage, most of it not terribly important, but there is one big change. When Constanze, Mozart's wife, comes to plead with Salieri to help her husband get an important position, in the original film he just turns her away (if I remember correctly, and my memory seems to be supported by IMDb). In this version he instead extorts sex from her in exchange for his assistance, or rather means to, but at the last can't go through with it and throws her out (and also doesn't help her). I don't think it's a necessary addition, but it does make sense; Mozart had once claimed a student of Salieri's for whom the older man had feelings, so it's a sort of revenge, and it also makes it more clear why Constanze is so insistent upon Salieri leaving her house when she finds him with the ailing Mozart near the end of the film. It's a little more screen time for Elizabeth Berridge, who I've always thought of as a bit of a disposable actress, but actually she does a good job.
DOES IT HOLD UP?: It more than holds up. It's far better than I thought it was. I was in love for a summer back when this was new, and the family of the object of my affections had a little money, which is to say they had a VCR, and she owned a copy of this. It was her favorite movie. I watched it with her perhaps a dozen times that summer, and I loved it, but I think I loved it because it was of her, if you understand me, rather than on its own merits. And then we split up and I never watched it again, because of course it reminded me of her. I suppose that, for that reason, I undervalued it in my memory. I guess I saw it as a simple period piece, a costume drama with an Oscar hook and some fine music, but it's much more than that. One of the best films of its decade, and I regret not having watched it more.
BEST THING ABOUT THE FILM: The music. I mean, it's Mozart, isn't it? It's among the finest music ever written. That helps the film's appeal to me very much. Music is my first love, I am a musician, and though I'm certainly not on the same level as Mozart or Salieri, I do know how music is performed, and how it's created. I write about movies here because I think they're more fun to talk about, but I understand music far more deeply. I can pick out complexities and themes in Beethoven or Schubert that I couldn't in Goddard or Fellini.
Of course the music in this film is beautiful, but I love the way the creation of that music is depicted, the way Salieri talks about it. I'll include just this small bit, of him discussing the piece Mozart is conducting when we first meet him:
On the page it looked like nothing, the beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse, bassoons, basset horns, like a rusty squeezebox, and then suddenly, high above it, an oboe. A single note, hanging there unwavering, until a clarinet took it over, sweetened it into a phrase of such delight... (sighs) This was no composition by a performing monkey. This was a music I had never heard, filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God.I love the passion that he and Mozart have for music; they are alive in it, and everyone else in the movie seems lifeless in comparison. It's a movie made for musicians. Anyone, I think, can enjoy it, but there's another level of emotion there for anyone who ever dreamed of being a composer. WORST THING ABOUT THE FILM: The film slows down quite a lot when it becomes about court politics. Those scenes cost the film a bit. It is at its best when it's about the music, or about the comic opera, or about the relationships between Mozart and Constanze, Mozart and his father, or (obviously) Mozart and Salieri. Frankly, I could have done without the rest of the court, and even Jeffrey Jones. Sometimes in those scenes I'm impatient to get back to the things in the film that matter to me. SCORE: 9/10. It's very tough to call, between eight or nine stars, but I think upon consideration I must go high. And of course, it moves up the lists as well. LISTS: #17 on my Favorites of the Eighties
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