Jeremy’s Tophunder №82: Amadeus

5 min readApr 4, 2020

What is the world’s greatest curse? If you ask Antonio Salieri (played by F. Murray Abraham), there is no greater curse than mediocrity. Specifically, the mediocrity that comes from being well-respected in your field, and yet, still woefully and hopelessly outclassed by someone else.

(Fictionalized) Salieri was to (fictionalized) Mozart as Malone was to Jordan, as Tom was to Jerry, as every golfer was to Tiger Woods in the early 2000s, only it wasn’t common knowledge. Some people are just plain better, but in some cases, it takes being close to even realize.

There’s a scene in Good Will Hunting where Professor Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgard) can’t prove a theorem that to Will (Matt Damon) is child’s play. Lambeau (one of the best mathematicians in the world) sits on the floor in despair and says to Will, “there’s only a handful of people in the world that can tell the difference between you and me, but I’m one of them. Most days I wish I had never met you, because then I could sleep at night.”

After Roger Federer beat Andy Roddick in the 2005 Wimbledon Finals (the third straight year Federer knocked Roddick out), Roddick said, “I couldn’t have asked more of myself. I put in all the work, and I wanted to win this so badly. This guy is the best … Maybe I’ll just punch him or something.”

Amadeus is those two quotes, but two and a half hours long.

I saw Amadeus for the first time in college, when I was watching as many Oscar-winning movies as possible in my effort to become The Movie Guy. I went into Amadeus expecting it to be one of those movies where you saw that it won Best Picture and a bunch of other awards, but ended up -very- confused as to how anyone actually liked it that much. The 80s had a bunch of those. That’s not what happened, though. It’s really an incredible movie.

I grew up kind of thinking that classical music was dumb. I didn’t really play instruments growing up (my parents made me take piano lessons, but I always hated it), and it’s not like we were a family that went to the symphony. We went to Chili’s and rented a movie. To me, classical music all sounded the same. The only “classical” music I liked wasn’t actually classical. It was contemporary orchestral music, and it was exclusively the soundtracks to movies like Star Wars and and Jurassic Park.

The music in Amadeus amazing. It was the first time I ever thought to myself, “maybe classical music is actually good.” I’ve gotten more and more into classical music ever since. I wouldn’t say I know it nearly as well as I do contemporary music, but Mozart and Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and Brahms and Haydn all occupy a Spotify playlist that I turn to every now and then.

There are some parts of Amadeus that feel -very- 80s (and not in a good way). It’s a movie that takes place in Vienna, featuring Mozart (Austrian), Salieri (Italian), the Holy Roman Emperor (also Austrian), and other characters who represented other countries in Europe. In the whole movie, one person speaks with an English accent, and one person speaks with a German-Austrian accent. Everyone else speaks plain American English with no accent (but some for a few scenes also try on a British accent before giving it up). Like, it’s a little weird. Not enough to fully distract from how good the movie is, but you do notice it. If they were re-making this movie now, it’s probably in subtitles (and it’s probably better).

As good as the performances of F. Murray Abraham (Salieri) and Tom Hulce (Mozart) are, some of the other performances are, well, lacking. Elizabeth Berridge plays Mozart’s wife, and she’s not great. She might not even be good. She has a few scenes where she’s good enough, a few scenes where you don’t really notice her either way, but then several scenes where it’s very, very noticeable. Like, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she was the third lead in a movie that won eight Oscars (including Best Picture) and then was basically never heard from again. She has a total of eight film credits in the last 35 years. Abraham and Hulce both received nominations for Best Actor (which Abraham won), and they were well-deserved. Abraham wins just about every scene he’s in, and carries the movie as it’s narrator through flashbacks. Hulce started off good but not great, but his performance gets progressively better as Mozart descends into alcoholism and madness.

The premise of the movie is part of what sells it. The relationship between Salieri and Mozart has been well-documented over the years. While on the surface they appear to have been friends (as Salieri in the movie leads Mozart to believe), it’s probably also true that Mozart and his father blamed the Italian composers in Vienna (including and perhaps especially Salieri) for Mozart’s struggles to rise to be recognized as the transcendent talent that he was. It’s also true that Mozart died especially young, under mysterious circumstances. So, why not write a story about how Salieri secretly hated Mozart out of jealousy, actively politicked against him to hinder his career, and may or may not have been responsible for his death? At the very least, let’s have Salieri lose his marbles in his old age, confess to murdering Mozart, and then tell the whole story to a priest who comes to hear his confession as he toils away in an early 1800s version of a mental hospital.

I relate to Salieri’s misery, at least a little bit. I’m a pretty competitive person, and I don’t like to lose. But more than that, there are some things that I like to think that I’m pretty good at, until I run into somebody that is way, way better than I am. Then all of a sudden I’m miserable. I think it’s a pretty common mindset — we tend to compare ourselves to people we perceive as better than us rather than those we perceive as worse. There are some people who we are in awe of their abilities, but there are others who we are jealous and resentful of.

Amadeus has a lot of things going for it. It has great performances, great music, and great visuals (I particularly love the Hero Shots that both Abraham and Hulce get while conducting). It’s a fictional premise, but a compelling one, and a relatable one (kind of). It’s technically near-flawless, and only suffers from some errors of its era, not really of its own doing. Aremake could conceivably fix those errors and make it a better movie, but I like this one just fine, and it clocks in at №82.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

6. The Fugitive

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

17. Ocean’s 11

22. Remember The Titans

24. Apollo 13

31. The Lost World: Jurassic Park

34. Catch Me If You Can

45. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back