Brando

NYPress.com

LARGER THAN LIFE
The enormous talent and waistline of Brando

When you think of Marlon Brando, the names Cloris Leachman and Ed Begley Jr. probably don’t come rushing to mind. But in Mimi Freedman’s fascinating and wide-ranging documentary, Brando, the two actors are the unlikely bookends of the star’s adult life. Freedman shows it to be an adulthood that began with waves of extreme physicality and sexual prowess and ended with layers of fat, familial devastation and an absurd plan to power his home with a pool full of electric eels.

With repeated airings on TCM, the film reveals how Brando’s Midwest upbringing by an abusive father and alcoholic mother created within him an Oedipal complex as large and wide as the Hollywood Hills. A devastating clip from an Edward R. Murrow interview shows papa Brando saying that he’s not at all proud of his son’s acting, but is otherwise proud of him as a man. Marlon’s eyes fill with contempt. Meanwhile, his caring nanny’s dark skin tone, it’s conjectured, led him on the path to marry a Mexican starlet and later a Tahitian beauty.

But, before he put himself out to stud, the wild one bedded, then ignored, as many actresses as he could manage. More than one interviewee suggests the only reason Brando acted at all was to collect women. Angie Dickinson goes atwitter in remembrance, but Leachman declares she was wooed early on but had the sense not to succumb. Instead, she married George Englund, a great friend of Brando and the film’s best source for what went on in Brando’s brain; how his womanizing was about striking back at his mother, how his search for a great director was really a search for a better father and how none ever would compare to Elia Kazan and their relationship during A Streetcar Named Desire. Bernardo Bertolucci, on the other hand, proclaims that he made Brando dig too deep for the explicit scenes in Last Tango in Paris, turning Brando even further away from his craft. In his last two decades he would grow obese, deal with his son’s killing of his daughter’s boyfriend (and the daughter’s subsequent suicide) and form a friendship with Begley whom he would talk with for hours on every conceivable topic, except acting.
- Stan Friedman   May 30, 2007