'Listen to Me Marlon' (second review)

Violence was always part of Brando’s makeup, and part of the sensation he caused when he first emerged was related to the lingering effects of World War II. Millions of veterans came home, and very few of those who had seen action wanted to talk about it. The violence they had experienced and inflicted was to be put away with their medals and souvenirs; it had no place in civilian life. Marlon Brando had been a 4-F — a fact his appalling father, Marlon Sr., derided him for — but his Omaha childhood had stoked enough fury in him for a lifetime, and when he found the role that defined him, that of Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar, he was able to tap both into his own rage and the cruelty that had formed it. Brando said that he hated the cockily brutal Stanley he created, and well he might have: It was his own father he brought to life, glorying in his new paternity but already a menace to the child he had sired. In Streetcar, it is his sister-in-law Blanche whom Stanley destroys, but there can be little doubt that his newborn son will follow, and his wife Stella’s instinct is to protect him. But it is perhaps already too late, for, as Tennessee Williams suggests, the Stanleys of this world will have their prey.

A career marked by polarities

When Brando brought his Stanley to the Broadway stage in 1947, it created a sensation that went beyond the character and the performance itself. The raw male violence it projected, a violence that Brando seemed to have conjured up from deep within himself, was also that of the war generation that had no outlet in civilian life. Brando was to bring his Stanley to the screen in 1951, and film would never be the same. But his first film role, tellingly, was as a paraplegic war veteran in The Men. Brando’s Ken is, here, not a man who, like Stanley, insists on his place in the world and casually clears others out of his way, but someone denied place at all, and whose very existence is deemed a social embarrassment.

These polarities would define much of Brando’s career, often expressed within the same role. His heroes were often doomed men who, like his Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty, must pay for a moment of redemptive violence with death or exile. In Last Tango in Paris, an act of the frankest sexuality ultimately leads to a squalid death, deliberately provoked by Brando’s anonymous character. Brando himself was shocked by the performance he gave, and he may have seen a dead end in it, much as it opened the way for others. The Method acting taught to him by Stella Adler required the actor to look into himself for his role. What Brando might have seen in Last Tango was perhaps all too much of himself.

By the time of Last Tango and the film that far more importantly (if less interestingly) defined Brando’s later reputation, The Godfather, his career was already on the rocks, and what those two films portended was not its revival but its culmination. In Stevan Riley’s new documentary, Listen to Me Marlon, the most critical moment is the image of Brando’s Last Tango character curled up in death in his shabby overcoat, his face averted from us, while a voiceover hails his triumphant return. There would be, alas, no second act in this American life, but a long descent to oblivion punctuated only by one last, astonishing performance in the cameo role of Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. It was only the taste of what would not, and perhaps could not, be.

Boredom, indifference

Riley’s film draws on the recent discovery of about 300 hours of private tapes that Brando made in his later years. These form the frame, and in part the content of the film, which moves jerkily through Brando’s life and career. Brando was not a sloppy actor, though when he was bored — as would occur more and more frequently — he could appear a surprisingly indifferent one. His best work shows the intensity that can only come from great discipline and application, but he found few roles he could fully inhabit. One of the last of the studio stars, he could not find his way in the new world of independent production companies and in the actor-director career of someone like Clint Eastwood (or Olivier). His one venture into directing, One-Eyed Jacks, showed both the talent he had behind a camera and the narcissism that kept him from developing it.

If there is a career to which Brando’s might be compared, it is that of Orson Welles. Both men made sensational debuts that exhibited prodigious talent; both ran afoul of Hollywood without ever gaining a footing elsewhere; both seemed to almost mockingly squander their talent as they disappeared into their girth. Both stay with us, larger than life but telling us something about ourselves — about the American career — that is deeply disturbing.

For Joanna Rotté's review of Listen to Me Marlon, click here.