Featuring Renée Fleming, Jonathan Miller, and Lang Lang. Unrated. Plays Friday and Saturday, December 7 and 8, and Monday to Wednesday, December 10 to 12, at the Vancity Theatre

According to Artur Schnabel's mischievous formulation about piano studies, Mozart is too easy for amateurs and too difficult for professionals. That also applies to filmmakers. A cacophony of talking heads doesn't entirely bury the brilliance of Wolfgang Amadeus's music, but Phil Grabsky's grab bag of great performances, chats of varying value, and truly pointless travel photography is trying hard, but in all the wrong ways. Amadeus it ain't.

The film, narrated by Juliet Stevenson, makes an overly ambitious attempt to cover all the highlights of Mozart's life, augmented by snippets of famous letters to and from his parents. The best insights, unless you are looking for 18th-century fart jokes, come from top musicians (Renée Fleming, Lang Lang), conductors (Roger Norrington), and stage directors (Jonathan Miller is the most amusing). They talk about–with subtitles at times–and demonstrate favourite details of the young maestro's essential work. Some passages are extremely well played and recorded, occasionally without interruption.

It's a 128-minute condensation of a series made for European TV, so some shifts are abrupt. But if they are leaving things out, why did the filmmakers, in the process of retracing the composer's widely travelled steps, think we'd have time to watch people in jeans talking on cellphones in modern Vienna, Rome, and Salzburg? Talk about too easy.

Mozart is double-billed with The Rape of Europa, which looks at the Nazi plunder of art treasure, this time with Robert M. Edsel, the doc's coproducer, available to discuss it on opening night.