Review of Amadeus (1984) by Prach P — 14 May 2013

To me, this movie is secondarily about Mozart and his music, and primarily about Antonio Salieri and his envy and conscience.

Mozart is portrayed as a simple prodigy - childish, passionate and simply talented. In this sense, he is a very shallow character. And the film, while following him all the time, does not try to bring us into his mind at all: we observe him but cannot know what he thinks. In doing this, the film seems to takes the attitude that the mind of a genius is incomprehensible to us, and therefore we just need to take him as he is - i.e. a simple genius, end of explanation.

Salieri, on the other hand, has a lot more depth. He grew up as a kid with a mind that saw great beauty in such an immaterial thing as music - something totally incomprehensible to his family. But as a composer, he is only mediocre. Throughout the movie, Salieri face a constant trilemma. It is a trilemma motivated firstly by Salieri's envy of Mozart and the resulting desire to sabotage Mozart's work and life; secondly by Salieri's love of music and the resulting desire to appreciate yet another masterpiece from Mozart; and finally by Salieri's own conscience. Sometimes one of these three motives outweighs the others, other times not, (which is to be expected in a normal human being).

But perhaps contrary to what most people think, I think Salieri's conscience is very strong. While a few times he devised plans to mislead others, he never could deceive himself about the true value of Mozart's works and the relative merit of his own works. Never once did he lie when people asked him what he thought of Mozart's works. He would describe it, with tears in his eyes, as "marvellous", "miraculous", "astounding". I believe if he could find more expressive words, he would have used them, even though those words would trivialise his own works even further.

In the end, I think I drew more inspiration from Salieri than from Mozart.