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Tom Hulce & Karl-heinz Teuber in Amadeus (1984)

Don’t get history lessons from Hollywood

September 26, 2019WDAV BlogMy Year with Mozart, News & Features, UncategorizedLawrence ToppmanComments Off on Don’t get history lessons from Hollywood

By Lawrence Toppman

The movie “Amadeus” went into wide release 35 years ago last week. It quickly ensconced itself in America’s consciousness: It was nominated for 11 Oscars and earned eight, including best picture, and it ranks 83rd on the Internet Movie Database list of all-time audience favorites.

Countless viewers told me, “Now I understand Mozart better.” Even this month, when I mentioned I was writing a blog called My Year with Mozart, a friend replied, “Oh, he was crazy!” I told him the movie on which he based that view had numerous inaccuracies, and he frowned: Hadn’t the filmmakers done research?

I used to get this a lot as film critic for The Charlotte Observer. People would watch a historical picture and tell me, “I never knew….” I would have to explain that, counter to Oliver Stone’s view in “JFK,” we lacked credible evidence that Lyndon Johnson became president by taking part in Kennedy’s assassination. (The eye-opening book “Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies” gauges the accuracy of dozens of such projects but skips “Amadeus.”)

It’s a big anniversary year for “Amadeus.” Peter Shaffer’s play, which won a Tony when it reached New York, saw the light of day in London 40 years ago. F. Murray Abraham, who jump-started a stalled career as Salieri, turns 80 on October 24. (He was playing a bunch of grapes in a Fruit of the Loom underwear commercial when director Milos Forman cast him in the Oscar-winning role.)

The play and film, both well-crafted, provide plenty of entertainment. They invite us to meditate on the nature of genius, the feelings of hard-working mediocrities who can’t achieve their dreams, the failure of bureaucrats to support ground-breaking art – a concern in Forman’s native Czechoslovakia – and the brevity of fame.

But Mozart didn’t regularly write whole manuscripts in one faultless draft, without revisions. His wife wasn’t a giggling booby with no understanding of her husband’s skills. Salieri may have envied him – what composer wouldn’t? – but didn’t plot to destroy him. The thing that most annoys fans of Mozart is the depiction of the title character as a simple-minded, foul-mouthed savant who produced masterpieces almost accidentally, while behaving like a juvenile nitwit in all other respects. That’s why a friend of mine referred to the title in his thick Southern accent as “Ahm-a-dumbass.” Unsubtle, perhaps, but he had a point.

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