Riley opens his film eerily, with a digitised 3D image of Brando’s head that the actor made for himself in the 1980s, speaking sections from the tapes. This process has as much to do with psychoanalysis as it does with art and craft, and that's a big part of what made Brando, an uneducated but curious, brilliant and troubled man, the ideal ambassador for The Method. No superlatives can do justice to Riley's editing. Despite his towering public profile, Marlon Brando was a deeply private man. It looks out on backyards through wind-blown curtains, and peers at the near-silhouette of a young woman at the other end of a Nebraska farm house: Brando's mother, back-lit by sun streaming through a window. There's a lot of what you might call "biographer's intuition" in the editing, as when the movie cuts from Brando talking about how his cold and volatile father used to beat him ("He used to slap me around, and for no good reason") to a moment from the 1951 version of "A Streetcar Named Desire" where Brando's Stanley Kowalski pounds a kitchen table and leans across it to intimidate Vivien Leigh's Blanche DuBois. Interspersed throughout are musings made by Brando on the nature of performance, which prove exactly how deeply invested he was in his art. The the juxtaposition of Brando's life, work and words helps us see this. He seems to have been honest with himself, in these tapes anyway, about nearly everything, including his own dishonesty. Available for everyone, funded by readers. Riley plays hunches, ties events to other events, decisions to other decisions, as a knowledgeable and imaginative biographer might. Last modified on Thu 15 Feb 2018 12.03 GMT. by popularizing techniques he learned from Adler, which were themselves © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. There are intimations that Brando himself was, if not officially mentally ill himself, then terrified of the possibility that he might be, and fascinated by the possibility that everyone, perhaps even medically "normal" people, feel and remember life in an ultimately non-rational, uncontrollable, impulsive and indescribable way—that maybe, to put it colloquially, we're all crazy, and it's all a matter of degrees, and normalcy is the illusion, the phantom we're all chasing. Brando was criticized, even mocked, for going on national TV and proclaiming that white Americans were living on stolen land, and that the specters of slavery and the Native American genocide loomed over the nation's self-image, but with each passing year his statements seem less provocative than undeniable and obvious; collectively we're catching up to him. Some of the "childhood" images rhyme with home movie and video footage, taken by Brando himself, of the island in Tahiti that he eventually bought with the fortune he'd made by acting. It slips back and forth between present and past throughout, sometimes in the middle of a sentence by Brando, connecting events from his often tragic old age, his prolific screen career, his tumultuous private life, and his childhood, which seems alternately lovely and hellish in Brando's retelling. ... "Listen To Me Marlon" is sure to spark a reappraisal of Brando the man and the actor. It sets the tone for the film, which overwhelmingly draws on the effect of the actor speaking beyond the grave. Would Brando approve? His disenchantment with acting as phoney nonsense is all the more dismaying, given how much he had been associated with the method concept of pure authenticity, as taught by his great mentor Stella Adler. There are plentiful re-creations of Brando's childhood and his final days. Yet in the documentary Listen to Me Marlon, the actor lowers his defences to reveal his innermost thoughts. There are no talking heads in Riley’s film, no re-enacted moments from his life – just scenes from Brando’s work laced with archival interviews in which the actor discusses his life in that melodious, mumbling, unmistakable voice. adaptions of ideas imported from Russian acting teacher Konstantin 'Listen to Me Marlon' Movie review by Kenneth Turan - YouTube As written, directed and edited by Stevan Riley, the movie could have been called "Marlon Brando's Tree of Life." There is a constant, restless sense of exploration in every minute of this movie. (He would address himself: “Listen to me, Marlon …”) That unmistakable voice becomes a distinctly Kurtzian commentary for his own life, which director Stevan Riley juxtaposes with stills, newsreel material and interviews. Available for everyone, funded by readers. Listen to Me Marlon review – Brando in his own words 4 / 5 stars 4 out of 5 stars. Director Stevan Riley juxtaposes stills and newsreel with private tape recordings made by the actor as he mused on everything from anxiety to obesity, Thu 22 Oct 2015 18.00 EDT It will air on Showtime following its theatrical run. "You lie for peace, you lie for tranquility, Marlon Brando is dead, and I am bringing him back to life and putting words in his mouth. Last modified on Mon 3 Dec 2018 10.31 EST. T ry to imagine contacting Marlon Brando by ouija board, and you’re halfway to the disconcerting effect of Listen To Me Marlon, a formally unique … Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. But it reveals a lot about Brando’s poignant vulnerability and sadness. Riley’s film makes explicitly clear how seriously Brando took his craft. There’s an eerie, unearthly fascination to this documentary, which broadcasts for the first time selections from Marlon Brando’s private audio tapes: recordings he made as musings, diary entries, and self-hypnosis mantras to cure everything from anxiety to obesity. The shadow of Brando's father hangs over his life as a political activist, as surely as his relationship to his mother and father inform his artistic explorations as an actor. The film is largely told chronologically, tracking Brando’s move to New York at an early age (“I remember getting drunk, lying on the sidewalk and going to sleep,” he says) to study with legendary acting teacher Stella Adler; his first Oscar win for On the Waterfront, which he reveals he didn’t feel he merited; his later Oscar win for the Godfather, which he boycotted (sending Sacheen Littlefeather to collect the award as a protest against the portrayal of Native Americans in Hollywood films); his life as a womaniser who fathered at least 11, and perhaps as many as 16 children (“I was young and destined to spread my seed far and wide,” he explains); and the family tragedy that befell the actor in his later years, when his son Christian shot and killed the boyfriend of his half-sister, Cheyenne. Marlon Brando Listen to me Marlon - video review Interspersed throughout are musings made by Brando on the nature of performance, which prove exactly how deeply invested he was in his art. Yet Riley’s film is no tabloid feeding frenzy: it was commissioned by Brando’s own estate, and is entirely constructed of hundreds of hours of audio recordings, made by the actor himself. "Don't bring anything into the present that doesn't have the past." © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. For all the eccentricities and bizarre career choices, not to mention the sizzling good looks of his early years, Brando didn’t wear the moniker of the “greatest living actor” lightly. It is made from clips of Brando's screen performances, video of Brando being interviewed, and hundreds of hours' worth of personal audio, including rambling messages that Brando would leave on friends and family's answering machines, cassette tapes he recorded as experiments in self-hypnosis, and—well, who knows what some of this stuff is.

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