See the secret side of Brando at the Lantern

Many of us who grew up watching Marlon Brando act were amazed at how uneven his performances could be. He'd be great one movie, and then it was as if he would phone in his performance the next. "Listen to Me Marlon," a documentary that opens today at the Magic Lantern Theater, provides some answers as to why this was so.

Following is the review that I wrote for Spokane Public Radio: 

Movie stars are about as close to royalty as America has ever experienced. This is less true today, maybe, other than at the occasional red-carpet opening or at any one of a half-dozen awards shows. But it was certainly the case during Hollywood’s golden era, which lasted from the late 1920s to the early 1960s.

In fact, that so-called Golden Age withered away less than a decade after a distinctive non-Hollywood actor named Marlon Brando entered the scene. I won’t claim cause and effect here, but the timing is indeed suspicious.

It was in 1951 that Brando – who four years before had stunned Broadway by playing Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’ play “A Streetcar Named Desire” – brought his performance to the big screen. And even these six decades later, Brando’s Stanley stands as a study in brutality, in an ignorance barely informed by inherent vulnerability, but most of all in authenticity. It remains a great screen performance, and it set the stage – so to speak – for a career that would garner two Best Actor Oscars and influence the generations of actors who would follow.

But just as fresh and distinctive as Brando’s acting style was – a style that earned as many barbs as it did compliments when applied to his Oscar-winning, 1954 performance in “On the Waterfront” – so was his reaction to the fame that followed: He hated it. And as he would come to claim, he also came to hate screen acting itself – seeing it as a job, the only one he was good at and the only one that would pay him a handsome amount for a few month’s work every year.

So followed a string of films, some curious, many mediocre, one or two great, that only rarely seem worthy of such a talent. At the same time, the lurid headlines involving Brando’s marriages and divorces, his reportedly troublesome relationship with directors, his reluctance to play friendly – especially in later years – with the press, his 1973 refusal of his second Oscar and, ultimately, the murder-suicide case involving two of his 11 children, would further color Brando’s reputation as a quixotic, mercurial and inordinately strange blend of nonconformity and talent.

Which is why I recommend the Stevan Riley documentary “Listen to Me Marlon,” which opens today at the Magic Lantern Theater. Based on some 300 hours of audiotapes that Brando made, the film gives a personal portrait of both the actor and the man that both explains him AND confirms his status as anything but conventional.

Using the tapes, augmented by archival footage of Brando both offstage and on – including some of his movie performances and interviews with the likes of Edward R. Murrow and Dick Cavett – Riley has created a documentary film that might appeal mostly to Brando fans. But, too, it does provide a penetrating examination of a man, raised in a lonely and abusive atmosphere, who uses his native genius to succeed in a world of celebrity fantasy and make-believe.

Just like, say, the Kardashians. Only with talent.