Amadeus Director's Cut
March 2009 Reviewed by: Rad Bennett Format: Blu-ray	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Watching this opulent film the other night cemented my thoughts. It’s a miracle that we can now achieve in our own homes an effect that could only be previously enjoyed in a theater; moreover, we can no longer call what we see in our home theaters television. Given a good HD monitor, sound system, and Blu-ray Disc, the viewing experience can only be labeled by its content. We watch movies, concerts, or documentaries, not mere TV.

I had the same fine experience with Amadeus at home this week as I did in the theater in 1984. I enjoyed it then, and I enjoyed it the same now. One must never accept this movie as a pure biography of Mozart, but rather as a series of impressions inspired by the truth. There’s no proof that Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) killed Mozart (Tom Hulce), though it makes a good story, so much so that the rumor has been floating around ever since the great composer died. History shows that Salieri was very much respected as a court musician in Vienna and that he actually befriended Mozart on more than one occasion. They even wrote a (lost) composition together.

But in the movie Salieri views Mozart’s success as his own betrayal by God. Mozart, in real life and in the movie, was quite a cutup who in his early days enjoyed scatological humor as well as a good game of billiards. Peter Shaffer, who wrote the script for Amadeus, based on his play, sets Salieri forth as a frustrated man who can’t accept that God has blessed the hedonistic Mozart with so much talent, while ignoring his own pious attention. This Salieri is Mozart’s greatest admirer, but he gets back at him to get back at God.

The original film and the Blu-ray Disc look amazing. Milos Forman and his crew reproduced the era in which Mozart and Salieri lived without sparing any apparent expense. The detailed wigs alone would bankrupt a smaller production, and scenes such as a masked ball and a satiric spoof of Don Giovanni are loaded with detail and splashes of vivid color. The ornate decorations of indoor shots seem almost palpable, and dark scenes are perfectly contrasted. Blacks are really black, whites are really white, and everything in between is perfect and vivid.

The Dolby TrueHD soundtrack option is the way to go (note that Warner still doesn’t make the best soundtrack the default option; you have to select it from the popup menu). Mozart’s music is immaculately performed by Sir Neville Marriner and his Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields, and this glorious music is recorded with warmth and presence. There’s robust, well-focused bass here, and the voices in the opera excerpts sound full and warm. Dialogue is easy to understand, and there’s a little bit of effective surround that provides ambience for the music and atmospheric location sound, such as falling rain.

The hour-long "making of" featurette has an unusual amount of information in it, but the commentary track with Forman and Shaffer, amiable as it is, seems to lack information a viewer might appreciate, such as the difference between what happens on screen and what happened in real life or an identification of the specific music used on the soundtrack. There’s a CD included that answers a lot by containing almost an hour of music played by Marriner and his musicians. The set is presented in Warner’s Blu-ray "book" series, handsomely bound and printed.

Buy or rent this Amadeus and be prepared to be swept away into a cinematic world of the past for three hours (the length of the director’s cut). It’s a trip well worth taking.

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