Amadeus (1984)

Director: Milos Forman
Starring: F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge
Duration: 160'

The eight-Oscar winning work of art by Milos Forman on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is a film which exceeded the limits of musical biography. Based on the homonymous play of the renowned Peter Shaffer, it became an insightful study on the gap between divine talent and human mediocrity.

There has never been before in the history of cinema a biography of a famous man similar to Milos Forman’s award-winning masterpiece. Having won 8 Oscars «Amadeus» combines fictional elements with verified historical details and mere speculations in order to tell the story of admiration and hate that is developed among Antonio Salieri, a second-grade composer and conductor of the imperial Court and the diabolically talented young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, over the last ten years of the top musician’s life.

Between the two men and against the background of a masterfully depicted 18th century Vienna, the film develops a whole reflection on the complex and often catastrophic procedure of artistic creation and the collision of genius with mediocrity, offering a high quality film spectacle which totally respects the large musical heritage that Mozart left, while simultaneously knitting an exciting narrative around the audience.

Written by Peter Shaffer, who had previously achieved great theatrical success with this particular play, «Amadeus» remains an aristocratic and generous drama which doesn’t remind us at all of the predictable and usually conventional biographies of this genre. On the contrary, it is filled with energy, cleverness and dramaturgical weight, treating its famous heroes as multidimensional gears of the complicated and merciless mechanism that we call human state and offering a tragedy of Shakespearean tones and great indulgence.

Loukas Katsikas