Review of Amadeus (1984) by Zedzded — 27 Dec 2020

This movie looks gorgeous, the acting is great and the set pieces are amazing. But after watching it I felt something was wrong. The central conceit of the movie - that Mozart was an enemy of Salieri is just not true and not borne out by historical record at all. They had their differences but ultimately Salieri was a fan of Mozart and actually promoted his work.

I understand that they were not aiming to make a documentary and I understand that artistic license is often necessary to create drama, but when your whole central thesis is based on a lie then it starts to fall apart. I felt cheated. The filmmakers created this fake drama that didn't exist in real life at all. If you wanted to create a drama about a story like this go for it. But to create a representation of Mozart that is nothing like the man is fraudulent and does a massive disservice to him and it feels like the drama was shoehorned in just to make a story more conflict laden.