27/11/15
Sadness, solitude and a disillusionment with the American film industry: these are the veins that run through Listen To Me Marlon, Stevan Riley’s documentary made just a decade after the actor’s death. Brando’s digitised ghost head dominates the screen, its pixelated blue features materialising from out of the gloom. Book-ended by the shooting at his home on Mullholland Drive, the film’s narration is provided by the 100+ hours of never-before-heard recordings made throughout his career, punctuated with clips from his own oeuvre and chat show appearances; Riley’s real achievement lies in the editing of these semi-confessional self-therapy sessions.
Later in his career Brando became an intensely private man and rarely appeared in public. There’s a very clear divide between the strong-headed roles of the 50s and the domineering figures he played in the 70s; A Streetcar Named Desire was only his second feature yet remains one of his stand-out performances, and his Kurtz in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is frightening, poetic and entirely alien from his earlier roles. Linking many of these characters – like those in On The Waterfront (for which he won his first Oscar), Viva Zapata! and Mutiny On The Bounty – is a kind of social justice, a man who sticks up for his fellow oppressed, a persona which bled through into his own life. Throughout his career he nurtured a yearning for Tahiti, drawn to its innocence and detachment from western society, and a clip from the 1972 Oscars shows his rejection of the Best Actor award for The Godfather due to Hollywood’s depiction of Native Americans.
As a young actor new to the profession he was scared of being thought dumb, uneducated, but Riley’s documentary shows him as an eloquent, deeply thoughtful man. The visual weirdness of Brando’s troubled features glowing and writhing from televisions in dark rooms is tattooed onto our eyelids, a remnant of a past age captured for a moment in this brilliantly unconventional documentary.
7/10