Listen to me Marlon – Film Review by Frank L.

Directed by Stevan Riley

When Marlon Brando died aged 80 in 2004 he left behind in his possessions over 300 hours of tape recordings dealing with the trivial round and the common task of his life but also buried within it a substantial amount of autobiographical matter. With the co-operation of the Brando estate, Stevan Riley has dredged this vast archive and sifted from it the telling nuggets about Brando the child, the young actor, the Hollywood famous actor, his loveless childhood, his alcoholic mother, his abusive father, his dysfunctional relationships with women, his inability to come to terms with the disadvantages of his fame and much more. He also uses early home movie cine clips of Brando as a boy and adolescent and various interviews with him when he had achieved fame. Of course some of the iconic moments from his movies are there too. How could they not be? It is all Brando – Brando unadulterated.

Riley organises this unwieldy mass of material to create a monologue of Brando trying to explain his success and failure but also the demonic forces which drove him. It makes for compelling watching. The reason is that it is all about Brando. He has a magnetic quality. As an actor, at his best, he had no peer especially as a youth as his physical bravura were only exceeded by his smouldering, good looks. Those looks were to diminish given the life that he led but the ability to act with the right material remained, as his performance in “The Godfather” attests. However the emptiness at the centre of his life and the personal tragedies which were to haunt him became more patent in his twilight years.

Riley has created an autobiography out of Brando’s own material. No mean achievement. Perhaps a different editor would lay different emphases on the raw underlying material. But Riley has ordered the unordered which Brando had made into the story of a hero who very often in his life had feet of clay. It absorbs the attention for every second of its hour and forty three minutes duration.