Washington Post on Brando
Your Pal Brian
Marlon Brando Acted His Way Skyward, Then Fell Spectacularly
By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 3, 2004; Page C01
In 1954, a babe had a question for Johnny Strabler, who leans
next to his gleaming hog, in a pathetic small town in the middle
of nowhere.
"Johnny, what are you rebelling against?"
Johnny doesn't even have to think. Every line in his body
expresses the answer, as does the contemptuous power of the
machine, the beautiful sullenness of his face, the slouch of his
heavily muscled body as it contorts the leathers that drape him
like knight's armor, the rakish tilt of his cyclist's cap pulled
across his broad forehead.
He replies, "Whatta ya got?"
Meaning: Everything. Always. Forever. And: Even himself.
That was Marlon Brando the actor, in "The Wild One," a pretty bad
movie that became a cultural touchstone. And that was Marlon
Brando the man, who was a great artist and a great pain in the
butt. He rode his technique to the heights, artistically and
commercially, but never seemed to enjoy the view from up there.
In the end, he squabbled with everyone, ultimately exiling
himself from a culture that adored him.
You might easily ask: What the hell is with that guy?
And you might easily answer: genius.
On Thursday, death finally found Brando at 80 and he went to it
sublimely, having had much experience with the ends of things: He
had murdered his own career years earlier.
But in the beginning, oh, boy, was he something.
Brando exploded on the American theatrical consciousness in 1947,
in Elia Kazan's Broadway production of Tennessee Williams's
emotionally incendiary "A Streetcar Named Desire." Brando was a
jalopy named fury. He played the brooding Stanley Kowalski, his
body bulging out of a tight white T-shirt, his arms like oak
trunks, his hair matted with sweat, his face agleam with
intensity; nobody had ever seen anything like it. The charisma,
the heat, the anger, the sense of self, the animal power, the
capacity to dazzle unfettered by vanity. He was able to transfer
intact that creation to the screen in 1951, again under Kazan's
skilled leadership, and the American filmgoing public took notice
in a big way.
It's not that he was the first movie star to look "different." In
truth, he didn't look that much different, with his aquiline nose
and broad forehead. He was handsome is as handsome does. Others
before had been much less conventional in appeal. Bogart was no
Johnny Pretty, nor was Edward G. Robinson or Victor Mature.
Cagney was a street pug; Raft had never been a doll.
But Brando had something even those formidable precursors lacked
and the camera worshiped. It was the sense of working from the
inside out, not the outside in. This was the expression in
performance of a theory first propounded by the Russian
Konstantin Stanislavsky, then picked up in smart New York
artistic circles, where Brando, a student of both Stella Adler
and Kazan's Actors Studio, connected with it.
It meant that to project an emotion, one first had to generate
that emotion within. Performance wasn't a parlor trick, an
imposition of ticks and tweaks, an accent, a disguise, a way of
walking, a form of magic. It was something more primal, more
real, more powerful. It had to come from the dank, fetid psychic
jungle two inches behind the eyes to register, and the
authenticity was more important than the precision of expression.
Thus one could mumble, stammer, spit, hem, haw, as long as those
behaviors were part of the psychological text of the character.
The actor's belief in the emotion, based on memory, was what
created the audience's belief in it, not his mastery of breathing
technique and diaphragm-powered pipes.
Brando was the best of a generation of young actors so trained
that was just breaking through at that time. Conveniently, the
American theater was also redefining itself, with the help of
Kazan and playwrights such as the formidable Williams. It was
what might be called a titanic force of emotional realism, which
grounded the work in pain and despair and usually played it out
against squalid circumstances. It was a reaction against the
prissy, effete poetic realism of the stage and the formal tricks
of melodrama.
After the film version of "Streetcar," he had become something
more complicated than a great actor: a star. Still, he never
forgot the emotional fragility of his childhood, as the son of a
drunken, abusive salesman and a delicate, artistic actress.
(Salesman and actress: terrible combination from the start.) With
his insecurities, scandals, self-destructive impulses, need to
manipulate and connive, he epitomized the syndrome known as the
Adult Child of Alcoholic Parents.
That pathology was evident in nearly everything he did. He
refused to play the neat little 1950s game with the press, or to
let studio publicity departments manage his life by pairing him
with starlets and making appearances at previews or in gossip
magazines. He hated the dowager empresses of the Hollywood gossip
culture and had no truck with studio execs. He kept daring
everybody to destroy him. This was radical behavior at a time
when Tads and Rocks were being machine-milled to fit into the
well-ordered hierarchy.
But at the same time, he never went back to the rigors of the
stage, the pressures of live performance, the economic
uncertainty of flop or hit. It was a peculiar pattern, possibly
even classic passive-aggression, in which he tried to destroy by
extending only halfhearted cooperation after his name was on the
dotted line. Like a child trying to blast through a drunken
parent's cocoon of self-absorption and slowed reflexes, he
demanded attention.
The irony, of course, is that he founded a new style of movie
stardom: rebellious, beyond narcissism, almost countercultural.
He established a model of behavior that other actors, from Jack
Nicholson to Robert De Niro to Johnny Depp to Sean Penn, would
emulate, even as they replaced him. He insisted on the strange:
At last granting a TV interview, he cranked into the absurd by
kissing poor Larry King on the lips.
There is another, deeper irony in Brando's career: His whole art
was founded on telling the emotional truth, and yet he was
insanely jealous of his private life. He would use his inner life
for his work (when he ever so rarely chose to work), but he would
live in something close to solitude. When he emerged, it was
always in some form of grotesque circus, such as the trial of his
son on manslaughter charges. He was born in Omaha but soon enough
moved to Illinois, where his clearly instinctive aversion to
authority got him in continual trouble in public schools. His
father then sent him to a military academy in Minnesota, and
before he dropped out, he was introduced to acting -- a teacher
had noted his penchant for self-dramatization. He went
immediately to New York and started to study at the New School
for Social Research, where Adler, in residence, taught a
technique that was succinctly expressed in the famous phrase:
"Don't act. Behave."
He behaved his way to stardom, but within a decade, he started
behaving badly. He made a series of artistically ambitious
successes in the immediate aftermath of his breakthrough, such as
"Viva Zapata!" and "Julius Caesar," and then, after slumming in
"The Wild One," the great "On the Waterfront," as well as lighter
fare, such as "Guys and Dolls" (Brando sings!) and "The Teahouse
of the August Moon." But as a star, he began to feel the
temptations of star power: In "The Young Lions," he subverted
Irwin Shaw's brilliant World War II novel entirely by taking the
young German soldier Christian Diestl, a good man corrupted by
Nazism into a monster, and turning him into a good man
uncorrupted by anything, whose death at the end isn't justice but
tragedy. It was ridiculous.
Perhaps it was the anger he felt in 1961 when his first project
as a director, the out-of-control six-hour western "One-Eyed
Jacks," was taken from him and recut, but for the next 10 years
his work became stranger and stranger, with negligible
appearances in movies such as "Morituri" or "The Chase." His
infamous conduct in the South Seas during the remake of "Mutiny
on the Bounty" became legendary in the annals of big-star bad
behavior.
Briefly he recaptured a sense of engagement in Gillo Pontecorvo's
Vietnam allegory "Burn!" ("Queimada"), but by 1972, he had all
but destroyed himself with a reputation for difficulty, inability
to learn lines and the beginnings of a weight problem.
Then came "The Godfather."
The studio, Paramount, didn't want him in it, but somehow
director Francis Ford Coppola and screenwriter (and original
novelist) Mario Puzo prevailed. He got the title role of Vito
Corleone. Opinions vary, but I think this has to be the single
greatest American movie and his the single greatest film
performance. But why quibble? It's enough to say that the rogue
genius, coming off 10 years of failure, managed to tame his
demons long enough to give himself up to the dark part of Don
Corleone: father, husband, leader, visionary, diplomat, killer.
Somehow he resolved these complexities into a single coherent
being, and yet was secure enough to have no need to dominate; his
willingness to fit into an ensemble of another new generation of
actors was estimable. It remains a superb example of the
from-within school: study his death scene, where he sports in the
backyard garden with a child, a barefoot peasant on a hot day,
playing a fabulous little game with an orange peel exactly as an
old man would. And when the baby cries -- genuinely, as it was an
improvisation -- the old man's reaction is a kind of embarrassed
amusement, as he quickly tries to calm the weeping child. Then he
wanders out of focus and dies in the weeds as Coppola's camera
stays on the sniffling boy. It's an amazing moment, utterly
small, utterly true, utterly memorable in a movie full of
shootings, chokings and stabbings.
From that triumph -- his second Oscar, and we don't need to
mention that he sent a supernumerary to turn it down in the name
of American Indians -- he made his last great film, "Last Tango
in Paris," where, liberated and encouraged by the writer-director
Bernardo Bertolucci, he drew on his own complex childhood
memories and sexual experiences to create a memorable portrait of
an expat American named Paul, consumed with lust and memory in a
Paris apartment on a single afternoon.
After Paul, the deluge of dreck. It's not that he was washed up,
it's that he washed himself up, at only 48. Oh, please. "The
Missouri Breaks," in a dress. Jor-El in "Superman." Stanley
Kowalski, say it ain't so! "Christopher Columbus: The Discovery,"
"The Island of Dr. Moreau" ! It was as if having built something
wondrous, he decided, with the contempt the great have for the
merely good, to destroy it totally. And he nearly succeeded.
Even his last film, "The Score," is marked by his bizarreness.
Clearly he hasn't bothered to learn any lines and much of his
performance is improvised, when he's not reading lines off cue
cards. You can see him invent a new plot twist at one point, and
even his opposite number in the scene, De Niro, is subtly
startled by the weird direction the movie has just taken.
And in his private life, more chaos and destruction: three
marriages, possibly as many as a dozen illegitimate children,
extreme difficulty with his own acknowledged children, a morbid
obesity problem, a refusal to work, communicate or try.
No one can see inside these people. It's pointless to try. But
one of his great lines echoes tragically now that he's gone. "I
coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody," he rages in "On
the Waterfront." That was a performance. In life he had been
somebody, he'd been a champion. But then he walked away and
wouldn't play anymore. He probably thought he was saving his own
life, and possibly he was. For whatever dark reasons, he felt he
had to choose between his sanity and his art.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24629-2004Jul2?language=printer
Brian