Toward the end of “Listen to Me Marlon,” a new documentary about Marlon Brando that opened at Film Forum in New York City on July 29, the famously shy actor decries the trade of psychiatry. “You need to be your own analyst,” he says matter-of-factly. “Without looking inwards you’ll never be able to see outwards.”“Listen to Me Marlon” is the manifestation of that self-analysis. Narrated by Brando himself through recently discovered audio recordings he made detailing his personal history, the film is essentially the actor’s creation from the afterlife and is notably revealing. In these recordings, Brando was reckoning with his past, having a dialogue with himself. “Sometimes the best conversations happen in silence,” he told the journalist Lawrence Grobel during the five-day interview captured in Grobel’s 1978 book, “Conversations with Brando.” “What you’re really having in silence is a full and more meaningful confrontation.”The text introducing the film says the tapes were made “over [Brando’s] lifetime” but implies that the most illuminating, even confrontational, of them were recorded in the decade before he died, in 2004. This physical exit was preceded by a long symbolic death following his son Christian’s imprisonment in 1990 for killing the boyfriend of his half-sister Cheyenne at Brando’s home. Cheyenne committed suicide five years later, sending her father into a spiral of self-doubt about how he had failed the ones he loved.Brando, who sired as many as 17 children with multiple women, was keenly aware that he was not a model parent. Many of the recordings he made about his early years discuss his troubled history with his parents and how he dealt with their alcoholism and detachment. He spent decades searching for figures to take their place. In New York, where fled to escape his small-town life, Brando found the closest thing to a mother in Stella Adler, the famous acting teacher with whom he studied at the New School for Social Research.Brando became the biggest proponent of Adler’s “method” style of acting. But very quickly, it seems, he lost the desire to expose himself. The machinery of production corrupted the truth that he was constantly seeking, that he learned to harness in his work with Adler. Hollywood was a place of smoke and mirrors, shadow and light. The truth would get you only so far. Brando began to drift, first through a series of questionable films, then away from acting altogether. He became a fierce supporter of civil liberties, especially in his work with Native Americans, which was often derided. (One of the most awkward scenes in “Listen to Me Marlon” is when, during the broadcast of the 1973 Academy Awards, Sacheen Littlefeather, a member of the American Indian Movement, accepts Brando’s award for “The Godfather” on his behalf, and as she talks about their struggle, the camera cuts to Bert Reynolds in the audience, unsuccessfully attempting to hold back laughter.)Brando made a series of comebacks — the first, and most famous, leading to his performances in “The Godfather” and “Last Tango in Paris” — but few of the later movies he appeared in, often in small roles, were very good. There was no more searching for the truth, no more inner exploration. Acting became simply a job, a way to make money. Brando retreated to Tahiti for a long period (described lovingly in Grobel’s book), but escape proved impossible. The drama of his life, played out in the tabloids, pulled him back in. His life had become a movie, in which he was the central, contradictory character. The only way to find truth was to back away, take stock of what had happened—and make a recording of the entire thing, to be discovered later. The cycle continues.
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