Best Pitcher

Until recently, I'd never seen Amadeus (Milos Forman, 1984), and what struck me upon finally viewing this lengthy Best Picture-winner was how freewheeling it seemed. It's enjoyable. I always had a vague impression of it as a bit more lumbering and respectable, something closer to the stereotype of a Merchant-Ivory film*, but it's clear that it aims to be "fun," a little irreverent, with tweaks that are anachronistic or at least which run with the grain of 1980s fashions. Immediately, also, the Oscar for Best Picture going to Shakespeare in Love fourteen years later makes even more sense: these two films are very similar. I'm sure people have pointed it out, but I don't recall seeing it.

In both cases the films are gregarious, they have a loose attachment (at best) to the illusion of the actors' performance styles emulating a real historical time and place. (That's more a task for the production designers.) Loosen up, enjoy the in-jokes and the silliness, they say. But at the heart of both films is also a romantic gesture, shared by Dead Poets Society and plenty of other films, in a kind of liberal arts college faith in the power of art. Art transforms, it moves, it represents the best and boldest of our ambitions, and with a bit of luck, it perseveres. This isn't a vision of art as all-consuming, intractable, critical, or even really eccentric. It is, instead, a coding of something Deep and True and Wild that exists in its secret spaces or its happy cages. It is a romantic artsiness for the teacher, the parent, the graphic designer, the project manager, the person who contains the impulse while paradoxically inviting and celebrating the feeling of that same impulse being incessant, insatiable, and in fact uncontainable.

Side-note: I enjoy representations of people working through and appreciating scored music, perhaps because to my own musical ignorance is so great; I still remember Binoche's character in Kieslowski's Blue, talking about her late husband's scores and corrections ... it's like magic to me.

* Merchant-Ivory films are often not, or at least more than, the stereotypes of the Merchant-Ivory film, too.