Marlon Brando 1924-2004 BY STEVE VINEBERG

When Marlon Brando died last week at the age of 80, it was a shock. Not only in the way that Katharine Hepburn’s death was, or Laurence Olivier’s, because in some part of our minds we convince ourselves that the performers we adore have been exempted from mortality. Even when Brando ballooned in the last few decades and all but disappeared from the movies, returning occasionally in a comedy like The Freshman or a heist picture like The Score, he never seemed frail or ridiculous or came across as an éminence grise the other actors had to tiptoe around. He was as improbably graceful dancing with Penelope Ann Miller in The Freshman as he had been two decades earlier waltzing with Talia Shire in The Godfather, as flamboyantly, hilariously sporty in his dazzling shirts in The Score as he had been in pinstripes in Guys and Dolls. His sense of humor, which had always derived from a kind of incredulity at the continued absurdity of the world around him, remained intact.

But no, that wasn’t the whole reason. A friend called Friday morning, just after I’d heard the news, and when I mentioned Brando’s age, he sounded astonished. "I know this doesn’t make any sense, but I always thought of him as a contemporary," he said. I felt the same way. By the time I got to see Brando’s groundbreaking early movie performances in The Men, A Streetcar Named Desire, and On the Waterfront, I was a college student and the movies were nearly 20 years old, but they whispered intimate secrets to me across the decades about sexual longing and companionship, brutality and tenderness, isolation and moral trepidation. They were explorations of what it means to be a man and a human being in the world, and they were presented without the guards of style and flattery that other movie stars have always thrown up as self-protection. Brando ripped into these vastly different roles: Bud Wilochek, the paraplegic World War II vet whose every gesture is a protest against his reduced physical state; Stanley Kowalski, the unreconstructed schoolyard bully with the unidentified ache at the bottom of his soul; Terry Malloy, who learns that both peace of mind and the woman he loves come at a high moral price. Brando didn’t present these characters to us sewn up and polished — they were bruised and exposed and in process. He got into them somehow from the inside, and he was still messily inside them when the cameras started rolling.

Pauline Kael, in her famous review of Last Tango in Paris, told the story of her first glimpse of Brando, when a date took her to see the Maxwell Anderson play Truckline Café on Broadway, the year before Elia Kazan and Tennesee Williams made him a star in the New York production of Streetcar. Kael wrote that they arrived late, found their second-row seats, and looked up to see an actor so emotionally possessed that she thought he must be having an epileptic fit and averted her eyes; it was her date who nudged her and explained that the man was acting. Brando came to embody the Method approach to performance because his unstinting honesty, his disdain for fakery of any kind, was the ideal — the Stanislavskian ideal in theory, the modern American acting ideal as a kind of principle. He was as pared-down and as complex as Robert Frost’s poetry: all the knots were right there for you to wrestle with. To get at them, though, to discover a way to make the interior of a character the immediate subject of a piece of acting, Brando had to be a pioneer, Whitman-like, forging a new language out of raw physicality and scrambled, unmediated verbal outpourings and inchoate, pulsating emotion.

The honesty cost him. When, inevitably, his early triumphs — which also included a marvelously plain-spoken Marc Antony in the Joe Mankiewicz Julius Caesar and a vivid portrayal of the motorcycle rebel Johnny in The Wild One (a performance that immortalized an essentially junky picture) — led to the usual moronic Hollywood projects, he refused to turn off his feelings about them. In most of these dreadful ’50s and ’60s movies, you can read his attitude toward the material as a subtext in his performance. He was castigated for refusing to turn into a company man who subjugates his own distaste for the job he’s been hired to execute to the higher aim of — what? — completing a piece of studio crap like Désirée or The Teahouse of the August Moon. And he’s being castigated still: there in his Times obit is a respectful reference to the hatchet job Truman Capote did on him in the New Yorker in 1957, taking him to task for denying that Joshua Logan, the director of Sayonara, was any good. Anyone who’s sat through Sayonara knows the only thing that makes it bearable is whatever bits of embroidery Brando was able to produce on the margins of his idiotically misconceived character. That goes double for Mutiny on the Bounty, a lumbering pterodactyl of a picture that Brando sends up wittily, with his absurdly cultivated manner and foppish line readings. He couldn’t make the stiff Fletcher Christian he was stuck playing into a character — not with that script. So he gave him the Jon Lovitz treatment.

Brando rankled the Hollywood establishment throughout his career because he couldn’t see that it occupied a terribly important place in the world. Was it "inappropriate" to send Sacheen Littlefeather to the Academy Awards ceremony in 1973 to turn down his award for The Godfather and use the occasion to protest the treatment of Native Americans? Sure, if you believe the Oscar is more than the film industry’s icon of self-congratulation. Brando’s politics were grist for many a late-night talk-show joke, his reclusiveness was viewed as eccentric at best and insulting at worst, and his retirement from acting was generally treated as an indication of narcissism, the way Garbo’s had been. All of those interpretations have always struck me as perverse. You don’t stop performing and slip away to a tropical island because you have a manic desire to be noticed. And isn’t it a sign of consciousness and balance to believe there are more important issues in the world than the entertainment profession?

His reluctance to talk about acting was, I think, less a dismissal of his profession than a version of that stubborn Yankee masculine self-effacement that deems it unseemly to make a lot of noise about what you do. And did he have to? There they are for us to cherish: his staggering early work and the perhaps even more amazing things he did later on, in Reflections in a Golden Eye (the least known of his great performances) and The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris. When you consider how much of himself he laid out in these movies — think of the nakedness of the grief in the scene after Sonny’s murder in The Godfather — you might not wonder that he prized his privacy off screen as jealously as he did. In Reflections, John Huston’s fine 1967 adaptation of the delicate and grotesque Carson McCullers novel, Brando plays a major at a Southern Army post who’s married to a beautiful and lusty woman (Elizabeth Taylor) but is at an uncrossable physical and emotional remove from her. He’s a closeted homosexual, profoundly ill at ease in his own body and with his own desires, only dimly aware even of what they are — until he becomes infatuated with a young private (Robert Forster). That Brando, the most sensual of the Method stars, who opened up the realm of sexuality in his performances opposite Vivien Leigh and Kim Hunter in Streetcar and Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront, was daring enough to play an awkward, inexperienced gay soldier and give voice to the loneliness and terror that his landmark portrayals couldn’t examine suggests that he recognized no barriers in his acting.

Last Tango confirms that tacit conviction. Paul, the anguished protagonist of Bernardo Bertolucci’s still-controversial movie, has lost his wife to suicide and enters into an impossible, anonymous liaison with a young Parisienne (Maria Schneider). He wants to believe that they can have sex without revealing who they are, and that he can thus protect himself from another emotional devastation. Instead, this new sexual connection becomes a conduit for all the feelings he can’t possibly keep at bay. Not even the most powerful scenes in On the Waterfront prepared us for Brando’s roiling performance, which reaches its zenith in his soliloquy over his wife’s bier. I’d call it the greatest work ever done by an American movie actor. It would be obscene to ask for more.