The film “Amadeus” has always been my all time favorite. I probably watched it 100 times, sometimes I would put it on DVD while doing other things, just to hear the music on the background, the human ingenuity to the absolute perfection.
Last night, out of boredom I watched it on “Netflix” on my laptop, while checking emails and reading news on other browsers. Slowly I noticed that there were some unfamiliar dialogues and scenes, and I rewind it back a little, and kept asking myself “What ?!”
It turned out to be a “Director’s Cut”. 180 minutes, 20 minutes longer than the theatrical release.
In the original theatrical version, the Court Composer Antonio Salieri accused himself to have “killed” Amadeus. He confessed to the priest of the “killing” and went insane in a lunatic asylum and crowned himself as the “Patron Saint of Mediocrity”. I had always assumed the implication had been that Salieri tortured himself with the idea that he was, at the time while Mozart was alive, was the sole person who truly recognized that the young man was “God’s voice”, and his own resentment to “God” sent him to the insane state of jealousy towards this remarkable talent. Never had I actually thought that the “killing” of Mozart was actually “real”.
In the “Director’s Cut”, however, a few scenes indicated that Salieri in fact, actually tried in action, to “kill” the music protege. He seduced Amadeus’ wife and made her strip half naked in front of him. The scene was cut so that the film was released as a “PG” instead of “R”. Salieri had spread rumors in Vienna that Mozart was a child molester and was not suited to tutor young girls. That was why Mozart had lived in extreme poverty in his later life because he could not receive any appointment to give music lessons. In this version, Salieri actually plotted to “steal” the last piece of Mozart’s work and making it his own after Amadeus’ death.
Had this 20 minutes of “actual stories” been added to the movie, it would have been an entire different story, different film. I wonder what would become the impact to the Oscar history - would the film still receive 8 Academy Awards?
It makes me think that sometimes, real life included, things are best off to be left unsaid, unfinished, unrevealed. A vague conceptual approach may inspire the most beautiful and innocent perception and imagination, whereas a fraction of true notion would possibly spawn disasters.
