Kaitlin Smith
CompLit 490 (ULWR)
Tatjana Aleksić
6 October 2015
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Marlon Brando Resurrected in Listen to Me Marlon
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Just in time for the 64th anniversary of A Streetcar Named Desire, director Stevan Riley’s Listen to Me Marlon provides audiences with a glimpse into the life and psyche of Marlon Brando, the man that revolutionized method acting in Hollywood. Dictated by a montage of Marlon’s just-revealed personal audio recordings, the film tells the story of a successful career sandwiched between a childhood of neglect and abuse and a later life marked by loss and loneliness. Though it leaves out key details about Marlon’s personal relationships, the film drives audiences down Marlon’s emotional road and explains the triggers that sparked tragedies in his life. Listen to Me Marlon manages to fill audiences with love and compassion while simultaneously breaking their hearts.
The film opens with clips of trains rolling along the tracks, accompanied by Marlon’s voice, which calmly asserts his affinity for their rhythm. As the audience hears the sounds of trains moving forward to their destination, the story transitions to Marlon’s childhood. Clips of Marlon as an effervescent, carefree child are juxtaposed with a haunting score that plays in the background of much of the film, offering a dark undertone through scenes that might seem otherwise innocent. The audience learns quickly of the abuse Marlon endured as a child of two alcoholics and a physically abusive father. In his tapes, Marlon describes his father as, “…a man with not much love in him…He used to slap me around, and for no good reason.” In his adult years, Marlon’s relationship with his father remained complex. As the audience watches clips of Marlon and his father interacting playfully during an interview, Marlon says that this was a facade. In this way, as Marlon’s tapes dictate, “Acting is surviving.”
Marlon often compares acting to lying– adopting a face to protect one’s desired image. The audience of Listen to Me Marlon watches as this belief affects his life. The façade of a confident ladies’ man who flirted with everyone from co-actors to interviewers served as an outer layer that protected what was truly underneath- a man who was ignorant to love, and did not know how to find it. As he states in his tapes, Marlon believed that “…we need myths,” and his charm and promiscuity was his way of using a myth for self-protection. However, it only drove hurt in his relationships that might have otherwise held potential for love that he didn’t recognize.
Perhaps it was because Marlon was so accustomed to this kind of lying in his everyday life that he was able to channel a unique realism into his acting on screen. Before Marlon, audiences knew what to expect from characters in old Hollywood movies. Actors were type-casted into predictable characters that neither they nor their audiences could fully relate to. Inspired by the strategy of method acting, Marlon brought truth to his roles, drawing on personal experiences to make his characters real. Listen to Me Marlon tells audiences about Marlon’s relationship to his role of Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire. Growing up with an abusive father, Marlon knew abuse well, and used this knowledge from experience to craft Stanley, a complex and abusive brute and one of the most iconic movie characters of his career.
As the film progresses to describe Marlon’s later years, it begins to leave out key details. It does not delve into the stories of Marlon’s closest relationships, leaving room for the question– did Marlon have any close relationships? Perhaps Listen to Me Marlon intentionally left out these details to further emphasize his chronic loneliness, but it leaves audiences wondering. At one point, Marlon’s voice is heard as he speaks to himself on his audiotapes, recalling time spent with a woman named Ernie and reminiscing about her body in the moonlight. This woman is never mentioned again for the rest of the film. Perhaps this is to show Marlon’s fear of people– a man who longs for love but is too scared of it to enjoy long-term. However, it seems like an unfinished thought– who is Ernie? Did Marlon ever find true love?
Furthermore, the way that Listen to Me Marlon portrays Marlon’s tragic later years is misleadingly chaotic. The lack of explanation about Marlon’s emotional isolation and his unexplained “self-hypnosis” tapes manipulate the audience’s perception of Marlon, warping him into a hyperbolic mess. By the end of the film, Listen to Me Marlon portrays the sad actor as mentally ill– paranoid, permanently scarred by life, and unable to overcome. Marlon Brando lived a long life filled with sadness and happiness, loneliness and closeness, but the film focuses on the negative. Toward the end of Listen to Me Marlon, a clip taken from Last Tango in Paris shows Marlon standing next to a train- no longer daydreaming about the sound of its rhythm- but covering his ears and screaming. In this way, Listen to Me Marlon manipulates footage to portray a chaotic downward spiral that may or may not be indicative of Marlon Brando’s true mental state.
Though Listen to Me Marlon does not succeed in delivering a comprehensive and accurate biography, this is clearly not what Riley set out to do. Where the film does succeed is in using a strategic montage of Marlon Brando’s own audiotapes to allow him to tell his own emotional story. Listen to Me Marlon may not specify all of the most influential relationships in Marlon’s life, but it allows Marlon to discuss his true feelings about childhood, lies, and the roots of his unabating loneliness.