Portrait of the artist as a young (and old) man

Listen to me Marlon (15A)

Marlon Brando was the greatest movie actor of the 20th Century bar none. He used the techniques of the Stanislavski ‘method’ school and adapted them to a contemporary ethos under his mentor Stella Adler. Or so the theory goes. Brando didn’t like theories. He always denied he was a method star, just as Jean-Paul Sartre denied he was an existentialist. 

In this atmospheric documentary we learn more about the chameleon actor than in any heretofore, which is surely saying something. 

Using a huge number of audio tapes he made during his lifetime – nobody knew about this until recently – as a backdrop for some seminal stills (and interview footage) director Stevan Riley has crafted a mosaic of his life that resonates like no other.

We learn that he formed an emotional attachment to his governess Ermi in childhood. When she left to get married, the seven-year-old Brando was distraught. Her departure left him with feelings of abandonment he tried to fill with the many other women who became part of his life afterwards.

Both of his parents were alcoholics. He despised his father, who beat his mother and himself “for no good reason”. He didn’t inherit their drinking vice but became a compulsive eater instead. He went from the Adonis of such films as A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront to the obese figure who appeared in later offerings like Christopher Columbus and The Island of Dr Moreau.

He was always a lover of the underdog. This was evidenced by the passionate manner he embraced the cause of the American Indian, which led to his refusal of an Oscar for The Godfather in 1973. 

A vocal campaigner against anything mechanical, he voiced his dissension against jaded theatrical tricks right through his life. “Everyone is an actor,” he declared, “from the moment we throw the oatmeal on the floor to get our mother’s attention.”

Brando found an escape from the mercenary values of the film world in Tahiti, where he bought an atoll in the 1960s. 

He resolved to give his children a better life here than he felt they’d get in Hollywood, which he dubbed “a cultural boneyard”.

But alas, this didn’t happen. His son Christian killed the fiancé of his half-sister Cheyenne in 1990 and five years later a depressed Cheyenne hung herself. “The messenger of misery has come to my house,” said Brando.

This is probably the best documentary you’ll see this year, charting the life and times of a fascinating man in a style that’s dreamy, reflective, thought-provoking and, in the end, deeply, deeply sad.