As may have been expected, the sound design in Amadeus is great. The way Mozart's music forms part of events happening on screen (for example, Mozart writing it) and then later in the film that music also makes up the movie's score itself was really seamlessly achieved, and quite fun. I'm not familiar with classical music apart from little tastes of the big names, but there's no doubt it makes for fantastic film music. 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange are two great examples of that.
But forgetting the music, I didn't quite buy it. As much as I loved F. Murray Abraham's performance as Salieri, the movie seemed to want to be too many things at once: part historical drama, part screwball comedy, part man, part beast. In the process, a very deep, tortured character got lost in a movie trying to explore too many things at once.
It seemed almost as though the filmmakers (and, I guess, Peter Shaffer, although I haven't seen the play) were trying to cram too much in, and as a result some of the better minor characters weren't completely fleshed out. For example, if you were to use Amadeus as a historical reference you'd get the impression that the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II spent most of his time talking to and dealing with the two composers specifically featured in this movie, such was his screen time. And yet, his main role was to play piano badly and ask his advisers to debate each other. I would have loved if it had focused tighter on the main story and discarded all the superfluous stuff from the edges.
But still, it wasn't a horrible flick. And the frame story of Salieri in the sanitarium was fantastic.
