This week, I want to focus on just one of those movies, what is perhaps my favorite movie on that list of Best Picture winners, Amadeus.
I'm not necessarily arguing that Amadeus is the best of those movies I covered last week. Objectively speaking, if I were to give the nod to what was the best of those movies, I would says it would have to be Casablanca.
But Amadeus is a personal favorite.
I had seen period movies before but they always had a certain sense of distance, of remove from our present day. They were mostly exercises in artifice in powdered wigs.
Amadeus has a certain human immediacy, an intimacy if you will. For all the trappings associated with a period film of this sort, Amadeus feels more real somehow.
Perhaps a lot of that owes to Tom Hulce's performance as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a virtuoso composer and an extraordinary musical genius trapped in the form of a small, crude, cackling man. Mozart is constantly pushing against the pomposity and social mores about him, taking none of it seriously. Hulce's Mozart is like one of us if we were dropped in the middle of a royal court in 18th century Austria.
Fun fact: Mark Hamill was playing Mozart in the Broadway production of Amadeus but director Milos Foreman went with a different actor for the movie because he was worried film audiences would not buy Luke Skywalker as Mozart.
But Mozart was not like most of us, possessed of an astonishing gift for creating music that continues to stirs hearts and souls to this very day.
It is Mozart's prodigious gifts for musical creation that confound Antonio Salieri. Salieri, the court composer to Emperor Joseph II of Austria, has pledged to live a life of faithfulness to God in exchange for his career and his passion as a composer. For Salieri, music is something he's had to work at in order to get where he is.
Then Mozart comes along, a yammering punk with a braying laugh and a crude demeanor but also possessing a remarkable gift for music. It's as if Mozart is merely transcribing compositions that spill forth from his brain complete and transcendently beautiful.
Mozart's talent can only be described by Salieri as a gift from God.
Which pisses Salieri off.
The movie tracks the lives of Mozart and Salieri as their paths intersect in Vienna. Mozart composes ever more wonderful works of music that transcend art even as his life spirals out of control due to excessive debt and excessive drinking. And the knot of bitter jealous that clutches Salieri's insides draws tighter still as he plots Mozart's ruin.
By all accounts, the actual relationship of Mozart and Salieri wasn't quite this dramatically fraught.
For one thing, Salieri was a married family man with eight children and at least one mistress, not a pious, sexless loner.
But this story, this drama does speak to me.
There's a scene where Salieri is looking at some of Mozart's sheet music. Mozart's scribblings on paper become music in Salieri's head and he aches at the beauty of it. I find this one of the most hauntingly sad sequences in the movie. Maybe, in the context of this story, Salieri is merely a competent composer but he's good enough to "hear" the intricate beauty of Mozart's music in his head. In that moment, Salieri is good enough to know he's not good enough.
I would be remiss not to address the performance of F. Murray Abraham as Antonio Salieri; Abraham has to capture a precarious balance of Salieri's piousness and rigidity with the pain and turmoil that roils beneath the surface. It's easy to cast Salieri as the villain, the vain and self righteous man whose causing trouble for Mozart who just wants to make music and have a good time. But Salieri's torment, aspiring to greatness but trapped in mediocrity, is a feeling of despair that a lot of people share.
In addition to the performances in the movie, the music selections are wonderful. I actually have the soundtrack in a CD box set buried around here somewhere. Mozart remains my favorite classical music composer.
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Tonight, the Academy Awards will be telecast and for the first time in years, I am not making any predictions. I used to be pretty good at making guesses on the Oscars but it's not as easy at used to be and not as much fun.
Of the films nominated for Best Picture, I haven't seen one of them.
Well, maybe later.
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I'm not sure what's up with next week's Cinema Sunday but I think I might want to go a little less high brow. Maybe something with stuff that blowed up real good?
We'll see.
Until next time, remember to be good to one another.
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