Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Amadeus!

Spoilers are inevitable.

Yes, women look at you like this when you're a genius (you'll have to take my word for it).

Great Art is tricky to discuss. To endorse it as a concept runs the risk of being seen as either pompous or naïve. To deny, sneer at or trivialise it is to expose yourself as a resentful mediocrity, a little like the antihero of today's Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week. But I am old and don't much care what anybody thinks of me so I will offer you this pearl in hopes that you don't prove a swine: Great Art is joyous, transcendent and worshipful, or it is abject, painful and confessional. Amadeus ties this dualism into a neat bow.

If you doubt a virgin vs Chad meme can be sustained for three hours, here's a succinct summation.

That rarest of things, a highly acclaimed movie worth the hype, it must be understood that Amadeus is also flagrant historical fiction. Consider this a disclaimer to the effect that when I write of Salieri (played by F. Murray Abraham, whose name is F.) henceforth, I'm referring to the character, not the real person. We must further address the inevitable question: is the director's cut better than the theatrical cut? It makes Salieri more of a dickhead, so, in my opinion, yes. For Mozart's fault is trivial if not justified: he's a grandiose narcissist. When he says he's the best, the dickishness inherent in such braggadocio is drowned out by the fact of Mozart himself: truth is an absolute defence. His nemesis has a much darker, more egregious fault: he's a covert narcissist; wounded, scheming; cloaking himself in phony self-deprecation, mad online when people take it at face value. Mozart (Tom Hulce, Slam Dance) can scarcely help his verbal diarrhoea, but Salieri weighs each word and gesture. His self-consciousness hearkens back to that of Adam and Eve who eat of the forbidden fruit and see their natural and brazen nakedness for abjection. If only he were good enough to brag and floss like Mozart.

eQuAlItY has always been the motte of the covert narcissist, against the bailey of his special pleading: let me be best, but if that cannot be, let no man say the other guy is better.

How more poisonous is this sophisticated pathology than the other? Of course, it doesn't matter that Mozart is a crass clown, because he really is a genius as well, just like it didn't matter that Trump was a crass clown, because he gave us an unprecedented four years of world peace - but seething, resentful Salieris connived to undermine and sabotage him and install a turbo-mediocrity in his place, at which point the world relapsed unto its baseline of war and genocide, because the chatterati couldn't bear that they were wrong. Thanks, assholes!

Yet in his confession, which makes up the chassis of a Great Film, Salieri finds the rapt audience Mozart could command, not only in the form of his well-meaning but libtarded priest (good performance by Herman Meckler in a thankless role), but of the viewer at home and at the cinema, and so earns his catharsis and applause. Big brained thematic analysis aside, however, Amadeus is as entertaining as any western or car chase flick. The stuffiness expected of a powdered wig picture is headed off at every turn with an attention to tone that tap-dances on the thin line between deft satire and broad parody. The recreation of 18th Century Vienna is fun to get lost in. Why go to the trouble to hire a guy to play a rando out walking his bear for two seconds? Cinéma, that's why.

I couldn't find the bear guy in the credits so I'm going to tell people it was me.

And, of course, we would be remiss not to mention the most kino aspect of the work of all, the soundtrack.

"It was like the Elizabeth Berridge's cans of music" - Salieri (the real one)