Amadeus (Director's Cut)

"The chief aim of philosophy would be to divine for man, that most unfortunate bipedal beast, the means by which he may discover the inscrutable and capricious ways by which Divine Providence means to enact His will, and so navigate his course thereby, to avoid the thorns and brambles of misfortune."

Marquis de Sade, Justine (1791)

I well remember sitting in the back room at my grandparents' old house (which has been vacant and abandoned for many, many years now), watching Amadeus on a black-and-white tube television while rain spattered on the dreary window pane overlooking the equally dreary world outside. It might have been 1987, and I might have been eleven.

They played the HELL out of Amadeus that year, mostly on WGN's "Night at the Movies" show or time slot. I thought it quite a revolutionary piece of cinema, a movie that utilized characters that behaved with modern sensibilities, in a gorgeous Eighteenth Century setting, with beautiful period costumes, buxom women, amazing sets, and deep, liquid cinematography that was both shadowed and full of vibrant light and color, literally "picture-perfect." And that did not even begin to describe the colorful snatches of fantastical operas and the astounding, electrifying music of Mozart.

The performance of Tom Hulce in that movie, his youthful Twentieth Century exuberance, boyishness, childish giggling laughter, and his comic timing are now ingrained into popular culture. His love of fart jokes and scatological humor are now widely believed to have been the defining characteristics of the actual Mozart. So too the cynical, bitter, yet still weirdly ambiguous character of the deceitful and scheming Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), locked as he is in his war with God, whom he accuses of bestowing the gift of genius on an unworthy vessel. (Namely, the "giggling, dirty-minded creature" as embodied by W.A. Mozart.) This extreme envy of another's talent, this dissatisfaction with his mediocrity, inspired the short play by Alexander Pushkin "Mozart and Salieri," which in turn inspired the long play Amadeus by Peter Schaeffer, which is what this film is based upon.

Beginning and ending in a madhouse (one is faintly reminded of Marat/Sade, another film that, in its way, explores the tendency of genius and madness to walk hand-in-hand) Amadeus explores the bitter betrayal and scheming, deceitful vengeance of Salieri (seen confessing to a priest in incredible old age make-up by Academy Award winner Dick Smith) his role in sabotaging Mozart's efforts to curry favor in the court of Emporer Joseph the 2nd of Austria (played with reserved, genteel humor by disgraced actor Jeffrey Jones). The Director's Cut, here featuring an additional twenty minutes of footage, shows us what is behind, besides this, Mozart's self-created turmoils: his often arrogant, haughty, and insulting demeanor. Here, the lovable, tragic character portrayed by Tom Hulce does not come off as quite so lovable: yelling at his wife to "Shut up," comparing the daughters of Kenneth McMillan (whom he has been hired to instruct in music) to literal "dogs," and genuinely acting the part of a self-indulgent drunk, a dissipated wastrel, driving home the point that God, as Salieri has observed, bestows genius and mediocrity, tragedy and triumph, in a capricious, even cruel manner. Or so it seems. (But, we already knew that.)

The film fleshes out Salieri's sabotage, and his meddling behind the scenes, all the while pretending to be the friend, the ally, the "Admirer" of the young genius. Salieri propositions Constanze (the gorgeous Elizabeth Berridge) on behalf of her husband, so that he can be "considered for the royal appointment"; a proposition she readily accepts out of necessity. He then, having coerced her into visiting him in the night, rebuffs her silently. Bare-breasted, she flings a candelabrum at him as he walks out the door. These scenes, and the dressing room scene with Katerina Cavalieri (Christine Ebersole), a young opera diva with whom Mozart has had an affair, flesh out aspects of the film hitherto a little puzzling.

On the whole, Milos Forman's edit of the film provides far more in the way of context for the motivations and behavior of the characters. It will ultimately not change the ending, of course, which is a bleak meditation on the unhappy fate of man, Mozart's genius body buried in a mass, common grave, while his Requiem Mass plays on a cold, dreary Austrian evening. The final scenes are back in the madhouse, to which Salieri has been confined after attempting suicide, his attempt at self-destruction, to ameliorate his guilt for having "murdered" (but how?) Mozart. (It is an ancient legend that Salieri murdered Mozart out of jealousy, by poisoning. It is also rumored Mozart was murdered by Emmanuel Shickaneder, a fellow Mason, for revealing "Masonic secrets" with his final opera The Magic Flute; a strange contention since the librettist of The Magic Flute was ...Emmanuel Shickaneder, here played by the great Simon Callow. It is more likely that Mozart succumbed to a combination of alcoholism, dissipation, and having been served a bad pork cutlet while dining with friends. The immortal composer is said, by one source, to have expunged a "gallon of brown vomit" before he died, the official cause of death being reported as "military fever.")

The great lynchpin of the film, Salieri's bitter one-man conspiracy against Mozart, whom he secretly reveres as an "instrument of God", is given fuller vent in the macabre appropriation of the costume of a masked visitor representing Death, Mozart's father Leopold, and the Ghost of Leopold; and perhaps God, all rolled into one. In Mozart's mind, Leopold looms strong it seems; he writes his ghost, Hamlet-like, into Don Giovanni, coming back "from beyond the grave", to "accuse his son." Mozart may, himself, feel the unworthiness of his great gifts: the sacrosanct art of music, He may feel himself chastised by God, in the form of Leopold (or rather his ghost), given "life" by the masked Salieri, the Judas who commissions Mozart to compose his "Death Mass"; i.e. to herald his oblivion. It will be death inexorable, the end of his childish pleasures and games. But, as he asks Salieri, "Do you believe in it? The fire which never dies?" Salieri, at the end, assents, yes, yes indeed, that he does.

In the final scenes, Salieri rebukes the priest Father Vogler (played by the late actor Richard Frank) as he is wheeled through the hallways of the Early Nineteenth-Century bedlam, past the twisted and mentally deranged inmates, chained to the walls and locked in tiny cages; he "absolves them" of their great guilt, for being born mediocrities (but how can they help this? Is this the "justice of God"?), of which he is "their patron saint." One is reminded again of the ending of Marat/Sade, in which inmates of the French Charenton Asylum riot in their cage, a metaphor for the madness of the world. Sade himself wrote, in Justine (which was published, ironically, the year that Mozart died) that, the "Chief aim of philosophy would be to divine for man, that most unfortunate bipedal beast, the means by which he may discover the inscrutable and capricious ways by which Divine Providence means to enact His will, and so navigate his course thereby, to avoid the thorns and brambles of misfortune."

(Okay, that's a liberal translation, but ah well...)

Sade goes on to observe that a truly wise man might, considering how the virtuous are often made to suffer, while the libertines and wastrels are often rewarded for their vice, decide to sojourn upon the path of the latter while abandoning that of the former. So too Salieri, who questions and mocks God (whom he formerly piously revered), burns the crucifix, disdains Father Vogler, and exclaims, "Yes, go on, laugh! Mock me! Some day, I will laugh at you. I swear, before I leave this Earth, I will laugh at you!" He is speaking with God. When Mozart laughs, Salieri observes, "That was not him, padre. That was God laughing!" Salieri it seems, is being mocked from Upon High.

But he will have the last laugh, he declares.

Of course, in the end, Death makes a mockery of us all, genius, mediocrity, knight, pauper, or knave. And there is no curtain call.

Amadeus Giggles - Extended