The art of Marlon Brando is that of the flesh made word. He was possessed of extraordinarily powerful, complex, and contradictory emotions, desires, and ideas, which he transmuted into a similarly complex range of speech, both in manner and in substance. Not only did he bring a singularly beautiful artistry to bear on the texts of others, but his own words are themselves works of art. In 1973, Norman Mailer wrote about Brando that “Sometimes he seemed the only player alive who knew how to suggest that he was about to say something more valuable than what he did say.” When Brando said what he himself had to say, it was indeed of a unique value. That’s why the best of Brando is when he’s closest to himself, as in the Maysles brothers’ documentary “Meet Marlon Brando,” from 1966, and Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris,” from 1972. It isn’t only his words that are better than those of the screenwriters; his persona, his character, is greater than those that are scripted.
That’s why I eagerly anticipated Stevan Riley’s documentary “Listen to Me Marlon.” As the opening title card explains, “Throughout his lifetime Marlon Brando made hundreds of hours of private audio recordings none of which have been heard by the public until now.” But the movie goes off the rails just as it starts on them. It begins with a black screen, as a voice—recognizably Brando’s—delivers some technical details about the recording in progress. Then he launches into a story about having his “head digitized” and says that he “made a lot of faces” into a “laser” for that, and adds “Actors are not gonna be real, they’re gonna be inside a computer.” Riley, however, doesn’t trust Brando’s voice; he matches the monologue to a futuristically sci-fi-like computer-generated version of the actor and also adds eerie electronic beeps and bloops to the soundtrack. It’s followed by the faux-digital Brando’s performance of Macbeth’s “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” soliloquy—also with electronic beeps added.
From the start, the origin of these images is unclear—at first, they seem as if they might be the actual digitizations that Brando mentions, but several elements of visual trickery—notably, the conveniently expressive frittering of the face at its edges—quickly suggest that they are Riley’s own creation. The power of Brando’s performance of Shakespeare’s text is vitiated, trivialized both by the adulterated soundtrack and by the image, which is both gimmicky and of vague provenance.
The very existence of these tapes is a miracle, but the film, at nearly every turn, undercuts the wonder and turns it into a cut-and-paste job of a profile-like biography. Riley assembles a soundtrack of snippets of Brando, putting them through a chronological forced march from his childhood to his last years. To fill the screen, the director assembles archival footage of Brando, including (apparently) home movies, clips from movies, filmed interviews, and television news reports. Stock footage and photographs are used to evoke particular places, people, or times, and some original filming is used to suggest memories or events for which no stock footage is available. There’s also a tiny bit of shooting done in a studio to suggest the experience of listening to the tapes themselves, and these brief shots come closest to capturing the thrill of discovering the recordings. There are moments where tapes, with Brando’s handwriting on them, are seen. Though the shots are undistinguished and uninflected, they at least put on-screen the subject of the film: the tapes themselves.
But the sound of those tapes is further muddled, with kitschy sound effects (when there’s a shot of trees, Riley adds the sound of leaves rustling in the wind) and bland yet overly emphatic music that, by underlining the emotions of Brando’s remarks, dulls and flattens them. Riley doesn’t trust the verbal material that Brando provides, nor the physical material of the tapes themselves, which seemingly glow with the actor’s vanished touch. Also, dates don’t matter to Riley. It’s unclear whether Brando dated the tapes or whether the filmmaker can identify when they were recorded, but, throughout the film, shifts in Brando’s voice suggest when it’s the voice of age or of a younger man. But the snippets of Brando on the soundtrack are forced into a Procrustean narrative that, once again, detaches the recordings from the practical, physical circumstances of their creation.
The cavalier botch of this project is all the more grievous because what Brando says in it is revelatory, regarding his art and his life. He discusses his hard upbringing with his parents and describes his earliest ways of coping with them—the false face that he needed to put on—as the wellspring of acting. He talks about acting as the very essence of life. “When you’re saying something that you don’t mean or refraining from saying something that you do mean, you’re acting,” he says, and adds, “Lying for a living, that’s what acting is. All I’ve done is just to learn how to be aware of the process.”
His awareness of the process is, in particular, an awareness of movie acting: “When the camera is close on you, your face becomes the stage; your face is the proscenium arch of the theatre, thirty feet high, and it sees all the little movements of the face and the eye and the mouth.” He found the possibility exciting, and yet, found the art untapped: “I wanted very much to be involved in the motion pictures so I could change it into something nearer the truth. I was convinced that I could do that.” He speaks dismissively of actors of the nineteen-thirties and forties, who, he said, were “like breakfast cereals, the same with every role. . . . That kind of acting became absurd.”
Instead, he compares his own art to that of the boxer Jersey Joe Walcott, an art of surprise: “Never let the audience know how it’s going to come out; get them on your time. . . . Hit’em, knock’em over with your attitude.”
The only surprises that Riley offers in “Listen to Me Marlon” are negative—the detached, non-specific, heavy-handed banalization of the astonishing materials that he had the privilege to access. Riley, confronted with this cornucopia of self-revelation and reflection, doesn’t give a sense of thinking about how to approach it by way of film. He doesn’t have any more original or distinctive ideas about filming Brando’s voice than he does about filming the tapes themselves.
The question is doubly current, given the forthcoming release of “The End of the Tour,” the dramatization of David Lipsky’s nonfiction book based on the transcripts of his discussions with David Foster Wallace, about whom he was in the process of writing a profile for Rolling Stone. For that matter, it’s one of the founding subjects of the modern cinema, one of the critical cornerstones of which is Eric Rohmer’s 1948 essay “For a Talking Cinema.” Rohmer’s essay isn’t prescriptive; he sees recent efforts, such as those of Orson Welles, to create, finally, “a true style of spoken film,” and he calls upon “the avant-garde”—by which he means himself and his contemporaries—to “apply itself to creating such a style.” Rohmer himself eventually became, of course, one of the inventors of that style. But he’s not alone—his approach is only one of many, and the notion has evolved and expanded, as in films by Abbas Kiarostami, Shirley Clarke, Wes Anderson, the Maysles brothers, and Frederick Wiseman, to name only a very few.
Whatever Riley could have come up with to show that he was contemplating the remarkable fact that Brando’s tapes exist and that he himself has access to them—or even that he has the inestimable privilege of introducing them to the wider world—would automatically be an experiment in cinematic form. Instead, he treats the tapes as information like any other, no more notable or significant than the stock footage or sound effects that pull the voice down to their generic level. That’s why the failure of “Listen to Me Marlon” isn’t so much a matter of style or of form; it’s an emotional failure.
