But like I said: the movie, the longer it goes on, shifts pov and narrative sympathy, especially with the director’s cut restoring the sequence from the play that has Salieri first blackmailing Contanze Mozart for sex if she wants her husband to get the teacher’s job he needs and then humiliating her further by making her undress, then ringing his servant to kick her out.

Even without that, even as a teenager, I could see that the first half sets you up to sympathize with Salieri and in the second half, you begin to notice things like how whenever Salieri says “and then- a miracle” he means “and then something bad happened to somebody I hated,” or how Salieri seems to at least partly want musical genius for the social status it can get for him, whereas Mozart’s financial problems stem at least in part from his unwillingness to compromise aesthetically, as well as from his willingness to play and improvise for basically anybody who’ll listen, whether they can afford to hire him or not—he’s the servant of the music, not the other way around.