There’s an eerie, unearthly fascination to this documentary, which broadcasts for the first time selections from Marlon Brando’s private audio tapes: recordings he made as musings, diary entries, and self-hypnosis mantras to cure everything from anxiety to obesity. (He would address himself: “Listen to me, Marlon …”) That unmistakable voice becomes a distinctly Kurtzian commentary for his own life, which director Stevan Riley juxtaposes with stills, newsreel material and interviews. At the beginning and end, Riley even uses a digital “map” that Brando had once made of his face and that extraordinary Roman head to animate readings.
The result is a disturbing Max Headroom-ish seance, like a sci-fi movie about a secret plan to keep Brando alive. I’m not sure this changes much about what we know about him – more is perhaps glimpsed in existing news footage of anguished public appearances after catastrophic events in his family life. But it reveals a lot about Brando’s poignant vulnerability and sadness.
His disenchantment with acting as phoney nonsense is all the more dismaying, given how much he had been associated with the method concept of pure authenticity, as taught by his great mentor Stella Adler.
