REVIEW: LISTEN TO ME MARLON

'The suspicion that the rest of mankind is lying to you is a keen insight in an actor and, at the same time, a recipe for great personal unhappiness. “The most mistrustful man I’ve ever met and the most watchful,” said the screenwriter Stewart Stern of Marlon Brando, a man who raised screen acting to new levels of truthfulness but recoiled from offers of love or friendship as if they were a lie. It’s not that he was gifted but troubled. The gifts were the trouble. Brando saw through everything. “The face can hide many things,” he says in a new documentary, “Listen to Me Marlon”, directed by Stevan Riley and drawing on 300 hours of personal tapes found in the actor’s Beverly Hills home, in which Brando ruminates on his fame, his talent, his failings as a father, voicing regret for a life he feels to have been largely wasted. “I searched but never found what I was looking for,” he confides in that familiar, plummy rasp, like King Lear with a head cold. “Mine was a glamorous life but completely unfulfilling.” The tapes are a performance, too, of course, maybe one of Brando’s best—by turns bawdy, wounded, sentimental, self-pitying, bewildered—much of it teetering on the edge of pseudo-philosophical profundity, like Kurtz in “Apocalypse Now”. “All of you are actors, and good actors, because you’re all liars,” he says at one point. “You lie for peace, you lie for tranquility, you lie for love.” Newly arrived in New York with holes in his socks, Brando would position himself on Manhattan street corners, collecting faces as they passed, trying to divine their hidden thoughts and feelings. Faces were masks for Brando, and the film turns his into one too, using a series of Cyberware scans he had made of his face before his death to re-animate him into a floating head. We first see it, rotating and fritzing like a radio signal from beyond the grave, reciting the “sound and fury signifying nothing” soliloquy from “Macbeth”. The effect is spooky, shamanistic—powerful enough to give you goose bumps.' — From my review for Intelligent Life