Butler's Cinema Scene

Marlon Brando

“LISTEN TO ME MARLON” My rating: B+

95 minutes | No MPAA rating

Marlon Brando was arguably the greatest film actor of all time. And yet for the last 30 years of his life his motto seems to have been “Don’t send the script. Send the check.”

The widespread take on Brando is that with few exceptions his later career was thrown away on  crap for which he was paid a fortune. Moreover, the contempt he seemed to harbor for his craft bled over into his relations with the press. He was aloof and remote and pretty much a mystery.

This wildly ambitious and unexpected effort from director Stevan Riley and his cowriter, Peter Ettedgui, is based on 200 hours of audio recordings the actor made over the years. Basically Brando had conversations with himself — thus the movie’s title.  The subject matter ranged from his childhood (raised by an alcoholic mother and an abusive father) to his thoughts on acting, the price of fame, and the hollowness of Hollywood.

Though the audio tapes are arranged in roughly chronological order, this film is not strictly autobiographical. The effect is fractured and impressionistic. It helps to have a working knowledge of Brando’s life and work going in.

But the film is overflowing with revelations.

“Everybody is an actor,” Brando tells us, “if only to get the attention of our mothers.” Acting is surviving,” he says. It’s as natural as breathing.

The thrill of performing intoxicated the young actor, who relished every opportunity to “put yourself in another state of mind.”  The challenge was to “figure out a way to do it that has never been done before…you want to stop that movement of the popcorn to the mouth.  The truth can do that.”

Brando compares a human face to a proscenium arch, within which dramas and comedies unfold.  But he denigrated his own work: “It has nothing to do with me.  The audience is doing the work.”

And of course there were the perks of celebrity: “I was young and destined to spread my seed far and wide.”

Some of Brando’s comments are self serving. He was roundly criticized for showing up on the set of “Apocalypse Now” without having read the screenplay and ad libbing his role — a sign of his arrogant laziness, according to some.  But Brando maintained the original screenplay was a travesty and that he virtually rewrote the entire project.

That sort of attitude set him up for all sorts of criticism — criticism that he said hurt, though he was “very convincing in my pose of indifference.”

Film, he decides, is at best a diversion for weary audiences.  “It’s all about the money. There is no art.”

Brando’s survivors (he had 12 children) gave Riley and Ettidgui full access to the family’s archives, not only to the voice recordings but to a treasure trove of never-before-seen home movies and still photographs. But they seem to have placed no restrictions on the documentarians…this is a warts-and-all portrait.

There are, of course, clips from the films (“The Men,” “On the Waterfront,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Guys and Dolls,” “Mutiny on the Bounty,” “The Godfather,” “Last Tango in Paris,” “Apocalypse Now”) and even rare on-the-set footage.  There’s a hugely revelatory TV interview with Brando’s acting guru, Stella Adler, and even Brando’s early screen tests.

And at its best the combination of Brando’s voice and the evocative images achieve a sort of poetry.

At one point Brando said that if he hadn’t become an actor, he could have been a con man.

Who’s to say he wasn’t?

| Robert W. Butler