Contained within the maniacal laugh of its eponymous hero, Amadeus is about realizing brilliance from the depths of mediocrity despite one's own appetite for genius. As such Milos Forman's masterful biopic is not so much about its title subject as it's about the lives of those he overshadows with his prodigious talents.

Adapted by Peter Shaffer from his 1980 stage play, the film uses the narrative device of a flashback structure to bookend its plot with the benefit of perspective. Opening to an old man attempting suicide, the convalescent is later visited in the recovery ward of an asylum by a priest who offers him comfort. Quickly naming himself as the former court composer to the Austrian Emperor, the aged Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) sees his name ring anonymously in the face of his would-be therapist.

This very nothingness, this absence of recognition is exactly what bothers him just as he's troubled by both what he knows and what he's done. What he knows is his limitation despite a deep-seeded desire to be something more than a forgotten soul on the face of time. What he's done is to extinguish the raging heat of unvarnished ability he was never able to eclipse through his own lifelong labors. Upon seeing Father Vogler (Richard Frank) easily recognize the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce), Salieri recalls for us the path through which he made these discoveries and how he managed to murder his rival.

Moving backwards in time, the movie sets the two men in opposition to one another with Salieri as court composer to Emperor Joseph II (Jeffrey Jones) and Mozart as bon vivant on the margins of polite society. Forced to accept the presence of the loud-mouthed and talented interloper, Salieri sees his own position at court steadily eroded save for the fact of Mozart's own excessive behaviors and appetites. Once he's hurt in a pique of Mozart's adultery, Salieri declares covert war and focuses on insinuating himself into Mozart's affairs to destroy him even while masquerading as a friend.

Fueled by the memory of his dead father, Leopold (Roy Dotrice), Mozart is contacted by a wealthy patron who is actually Salieri in the purposefully masked disguise once worn by Mozart's father. With his marriage to Constanze (Elizabeth Berridge) falling apart and his health failing from constant composition, performance and substance abuse, Mozart receives his anonymous patron's commission to produce a requiem, poetically enough. In so doing he dies and is laid to rest in a pauper's grave, all at Salieri' insistence who lives through the rest of days with the guilt of his actions and the pain of knowing his worth will permanently stand in the shadows of greatness.

Budgeted at $18 million Amadeus was a modest hit earning its investors a tidy return and enough laurels to decorate the mantles of several fireplaces. It also caused a considerable revival in public exposure to, and interest in, Mozart's music and the music of the classical era more generally.

As a period drama with relatively unknown movie actors, although many performers were old stagehands, the film was shot on location in parts of Poland. Its appealing old world buildings, costumes and seasoned actors lent it a sense of plausibility despite Shaffer's creative reach past the historical Salieri who very likely had only the most distant of relationships with his hirsute rival. So too did the story of the original wild-haired rock star attract modern audiences.

Parents and children alike, all of whom were raised with various notions about rock stardom as the best example of music-engendered fame, were moved to understand the eccentricity of Hulce's Mozart. In the same film they were also invited to stew in the jealousy of Abraham's Salieri who echoes the disappointment of the masses striving for greatness yet still fail due to the confluence of bad timing, circumstances and the limitations of natural gifts and talents.

There are also small treasures sprinkled throughout Amadeus aside from its musical performances and flashbacks to the ancient Salieri reflecting on his crimes. In addition to the ridiculously self-important demeanor of Jones's Emperor, Patrick Hines is wonderful as Kappellmeister Bonno and Simon Callow, Shaffer's original Mozart from the play, plays the charismatic Emanuel Schikaneder with a sense of buoyancy and danger. Berridge is totally sympathetic as Constanze and Dotrice is undeniably dominating of his son as the elder Mozart. Even so the reason for seeing the film is the joy of watching its two leads spar in their fictional web of intrigues and ego.

Written with the more prominent role Abraham delivered a career-defining performance that he is yet to equal. Likewise Hulce's re-invention of a much-studied character from musical history adds the dimension of that wonderful, hyena-like, comically self-centered laugh to the portrait.

It's the laugh that stays with you and somewhere in its quality of soprano whinnies and hiccups is, perhaps, the reality of genius. At once piercing and inappropriately loud the laugh is symbolic of the man who issues such a sound into the world like an innocent beacon declaring the madness of coming disaster.

Mozart's actual brilliance was in combining the technical skills of a virtuoso performer with the popular musical genres to roughly balance the difficult equation of art and commerce when given the practical reality of royal commissions as the bread and butter of composers in his era. This genius is now closely associated with Mozart's youth and Hulce's invented laugh makes him out to be what we might well imagine he was.

Likely an intimidating artist and personality, many of Mozart's biographers suggest he was a drug addict, adulterer and leech as much as he was musicianship incarnate. Such characterization is duly suggested in Forman's movie. In an effort to steer towards the mainstream with a PG rating, though, the more fundamentally philosophical problems of achievement are advanced rather than more titillating issues like drug addiction to focus on the well spring of creativity and its idiosyncratic distribution in the population.

Some critics and commentators justifiably believe Forman's movie is overlong and slipshod with its flashback structure using Salieri as its prism. There is also purpose in the filmmaker's project to make Mozart's life an example of how genius is sometimes cast together with less desirable characteristics in completely unsympathetic people. Occasionally, of course, the balance of greatness with gentleness and intelligence is achieved though as often as not it seems tied to vanity, cruelty and indifference, thus producing someone like Hulce's depiction of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Beyond such considerations there are also a number of details in the film that standout in memory. Having shot Amadeus with natural light to give it a painterly feel, the movie seems aesthetically connected to its late 18th century by more than just its costumers and set designers. Oscar-nominated cinematographer Miroslav Ondrícek achieved this effect by covering windows with tracing paper for its interior shots and he was especially careful to diffuse key, spot and fill lights throughout the production.

Sets and costumes for the music and operatic productions, too, were based on sketches from the original costumes and sets drawn up when first performed during Mozart's life. The performance of Don Giovanni, as one terrific example, was itself conceived and filmed on the same stage where it was first performed in the 1790s.

With The Killing Fields and A Soldier's Story facing Academy members with intense dramas concerning timely social issues, the costume drama A Passage to India and the Sally Field showcase, Places in the Heart, filled out the remaining two Best Picture nominees. Between the four films were a number of laudable achievements in the crafts of cinematography, screenwriting, performance, direction and production design though all of them were somehow covered up by the shadow of Amadeus.

To one way of thinking this is a symptom of high production values shared across all the Best Picture nominees. On another level it's the result of competing with an eventual Best Picture winner about larger than life composers who may not have been fighting for national identity or civil rights, or even for the cause of justice or happiness, but were contented to vie for the possibility of transcendence through acts of creative inspiration.

Naturally it doesn't hurt Amadeus that it features wonderful music and terrific performances to calm the angry soul and dazzle impressionable viewers. Seeing how I was each of these people when first encountering it I confess I can watch, and re-watch, it without losing any sense of wonder.

Not a bad way to spend an evening. Not a bad movie at all.