Listen to Me Marlon (2015)

Marlon Brando’s reputation suffers from being unquestioned. The notion of him as the “greatest actor ever” makes him too easy to ignore. He’s like Shakespeare or Beethoven; familiarity may not exactly breed contempt, but disregard. His iconic works, The Godfather, On the Waterfront, Last Tango in Paris, A Streetcar Named Desire, Apocalypse Now, even Superman, are so woven into some people’s cultural fabric that we may feel we know them without even having seen them. The unique film Listen to Me Marlon is a profoundly revealing portrait of an artist that invites reconsideration. In a beautiful surprise, it turns out that Brando, one of the most private of public figures, recorded hundreds of hours of personal audio journals, and that his family invited another artist, the director Stevan Riley, to shape them into a film.

Listen to Me Marlon emerges as a brilliantly crafted piece of nonfiction, in which the most intimate autobiography is re-shaped by a total stranger. It is a rare wonder, one of the most original pieces of nonfiction cinema, turning Brando’s personal audio recordings into the soundtrack for a film that caused me to reconsider everything I thought I knew about him. Now his inner life is made available to the very audiences who made him want to hide. It’s a retelling of the life story of someone who has loomed large in the minds of anyone who cares about movies, someone we think we know, in which something new reveals itself in every scene.

Here Brando speaks from beyond the grave, tender about his family, passionate about his causes, coruscating about celebrity, and sometimes addressing the audience through his own digitized face. He comes alive like never before. As a real, living, breathing person like you and me. Not a god, but one of us, pained and elevated by the sorrow and joys of life. From the description of power, authority, fatherhood in The Godfather, to the articulation of shame and courage in On the Waterfront, it’s clear that Brando wanted to make art that would aim at the truth about life, and that his own search for meaning was lonely. It’s also clear from his poorer choices that the best acting is that done to serve the story, rather than the ego—or bank balance—of the storyteller.

Riley has constructed a profoundly moving and exciting film, and it’s a powerful act of generosity on the part of Brando’s family to make the recordings available. When it comes to Brando discussing the concept of death while we watch Don Corleone expire in the sun-dappled garden, well, it would be fair to say that we just experienced a new definition of meta. Don Corleone’s death means something to me. So does Brando’s. Mine even more, and both Don Corleone and Marlon Brando teach me something about it. Riley understands that cinema can mean something more than flashy entertainment exposures of larger than life personalities. It’s an opportunity to meet yourself and change. A friend spoke at a recent storytelling circle to raise the possibility that there was still a little too much "persona" in the telling. True community, for my friend, would be told in stories whose tellers understand the difference between the point of the story and the ego’s struggle to be seen. This is wise advice, given that our identities are molded around stories we are telling ourselves about our memories, for becoming better storytellers is also the path toward becoming more human. It also helps me understand why a film about an iconic actor, who lingers in the memory almost as a caricature of himself, has excited me more than anything else I’ve seen this year.