Thanks to his bizarre cassette recordings, Marlon Brando provides the narration.
Those characters. Kowalski. Corleone. Kurtz.
Those line readings. “I coulda been a contender.” “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” “The horror.”
Few film actors were as influential as Marlon Brando. He was at the center of some of cinema’s most iconic moments.
Yet he made relatively few movies. He was notoriously reclusive. In his later years, when he emerged in public at all, it was too often in the aftermath of some tragedy.
The mystery of Brando is examined in the riveting Listen to Me Marlon. Directed by Stevan Riley, the film is one of those documentaries — like Room 237 and From the Journals of Jean Seberg — that will make you want to watch movies.
But Listen to Me Marlon isn’t a straightforward retrospective. The film relies on two unusual conceits. One is triumphantly interesting. The other I have questions about.
The successful conceit is the narration provided by...Marlon Brando. He dictated numerous cassette recordings about various aspects of his life, and we hear these throughout Listen to Me Marlon. The narration has been stitched together from various tapes, so the recording quality varies a lot from sentence to sentence.
The conceit I find less persuasive has to do with an eerie, floating face. It seems Brando had his head digitally scanned at some point, and this imagery is the basis for sequences in which Brando’s monochromatic, animated noggin recites Shakespeare and so forth. I find these scenes distracting. I’m likewise distracted by several reenactments, one of my documentary pet peeves. True, they are tastefully done.
The film begins in 1990, when it was reported that Brando’s son Christian had killed the lover of his half-sister Cheyenne. We see helicopter footage of Brando’s sprawling California compound. Then we’re taken back to his troubled childhood in Nebraska, his tutelage in method acting under Stella Adler, his Broadway performance in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Brando’s Hollywood debut was The Men, in 1950. In 1951, he changed screen acting forever with the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. Other successes followed, including an Oscar for his performance in On the Waterfront.
Then the wandering began. Brando remained busy in Hollywood for a time, and an ill-starred production of Mutiny on the Bounty introduced him to Tahiti, where he spent much of the rest of his life. He pursued activist causes and made a few astonishing comebacks — especially in 1972, the year of The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris. After the anguished triumph of Apocalypse Now, Brando took only a handful of film roles, some of them undistinguished. On the tapes, Brando talks cynically about acting as a moneymaking endeavor, and he discloses tricks he used in lieu of memorizing his lines.
Let it be said, I struggled to make out certain passages in the narration, because in general the recording quality is not good, and Brando famously slurred his diction. But: THAT VOICE. How marvelous to hear Brando’s story told by Brando himself.
