Lis­ten to Me Marlon

In his 2005 mem­oir, ​‘Mar­lon Bran­do: The Naked Actor’, George Englund recounts his rela­tion­ship with the epony­mous act­ing titan in great detail while offer­ing lit­tle in the way of gen­uine insight – this despite he and ​“Mar” hav­ing appar­ent­ly remained close from 1954 to the latter’s death in 2004.

It’s not so much a fail­ing on Englund’s part, more a reflec­tion on the com­plex nature of this famous­ly pri­vate icon­o­clast. Read­ing it, you get the sense that not even Brando’s best friend real­ly knew him. Watch­ing Lis­ten to Me Mar­lon, you begin to under­stand why.

At the begin­ning of Ste­van Riley’s film, we’re greet­ed by Brando’s dig­itsed float­ing head. It’s a slight­ly haunt­ing, hyp­not­ic start to an unortho­dox biog­ra­phy com­prised of pre­vi­ous­ly unre­leased audio mate­r­i­al in which Bran­do attempts to unwrap his own enig­ma via self-hyp­no­sis ther­a­py ses­sions. Riley was grant­ed access to hun­dreds of hours of record­ings, allow­ing him to eschew talk­ing heads in favour of inti­mate self-exam­i­na­tion, so it’s dis­ap­point­ing that the direc­tor reverts to a more con­ven­tion­al archive footage for­mat for the remain­der of his documentary.

Riley also miss­es a trick by not pro­vid­ing any con­text as to how and when each con­fes­sion­al was record­ed, instead pre­fer­ring to chap­ter his film accord­ing to the more obvi­ous career mile­stones and notable per­son­al con­flicts and tragedies. We’re reas­sured that Bran­do was one of the greats – that much is unde­ni­able – and reli­ably informed that he was prone to dis­play­ing the kind of manip­u­la­tive, nar­cis­sis­tic and para­noid behav­iour that fuelled his noto­ri­ety with­in Hol­ly­wood and tar­nished his pub­lic image. He was a dream­er, a wom­an­is­er, a prin­ci­pled polit­i­cal activist, a lousy father. A reluc­tant super­star who broke the mould and then lost the plot.

Anoth­er com­mon view upheld here is that Bran­do was a trou­bled soul who suf­fered for his art. That may be true, but this sub­jec­tive, sen­ti­men­tal por­trait does a dis­ser­vice to all those who suf­fered for him.