Listen to Me Marlon

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A treasure trove of audiotapes yields a unique autobiographical portrait of one of cinema’s greatest actors, Marlon Brando. Over 300 hours of intimate recordings that date back as far as the 1940s reveal a frank, self-aware man, by turns funny, poignant, self-lacerating and beset by demons both inherited and of his own making. Notoriously guarded in interviews, this is Brando unvarnished. On the subject of his career, he is lavish in his praise of his teacher Stella Adler and upfront in his arrogant youthful ambition—fully realized—to take what Adler taught him and change American acting forever. Yet he is also his own harshest critic, taking himself to task not only for his bad choices but even some of his greatest triumphs. Brando might have won an Oscar for On the Waterfront, but what he sees when he watches the film are the flaws in his performance. He obsesses as much over his personal life, recalling the solitary boy happiest when he could escape into the woods outside his Omaha home and away from his alcoholic parents; later tapes reveal his sorrow over his own failures as a father. Stuffed with clips from films that include A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata, On the Waterfront, The Lady from Shanghai, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris and more and augmented by photographs, home movies and other archival material, Listen to Me Marlon stands as a mesmerizing documentary that illuminates a legend’s singular career and troubled life. —Pam Grady

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