‘Listen To Me Marlon’ Review: Marlon Brando gets to tell his story

One of Marlon Brando’s best performances on film is in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango In Paris because the great actor leaves it all out for audiences to see everything. We see the pain that has built up over a troubled life and one that would continue to be troubled until his death in 2004 at age 80. Listen To Me Marlon, the new documentary by Stevan Riley, provides an even better look into the life of a man considered America’s greatest actor.

The film is as close as we will ever get to a Brando autobiography, since there is no narration from anyone but Brando himself. This is no typical talking-heads piece about the life of a great man. Instead, Riley only uses audio from hundreds of tapes Brando recorded during his life, along with press interviews. The film is structured around a self-hypnosis tape, so it feels like the audience is on a trip into his subconscious.

Even though Brando’s rise in Hollywood has been replayed countless times, the film doesn’t feel repetitive. Part of it is because we get to hear about Brando’s reasons for getting into acting through his own words. But it’s also because the film takes a much more personal tone. If you want to hear what Brando thought about specific films, you won’t find it here. He does bring up playing A Streetcar Named Desire on stage and making On The Waterfront, but Riley isn’t interested in taking a trip down memory lane. He taps into Brando’s brain, finding poignant thoughts that we might otherwise have never heard.

During the 1960s, Brando became interested in things outside acting. From the outside, he looked like a man who refused to grow up. But the way he tells it, it was just him looking for an escape from the lies he told onscreen as an actor. He became fascinated with Tahiti after the Mutiny on the Bounty debacle and became very passionate about human rights. Brando sounds more emotional when talking about the death of Martin Luther King Jr. than the passing of his own father.

Listen To Me Marlon is so much more fascinating because it uses only Brando’s words to tell his story. There’s no historian or biographer or friends getting in the way of him telling his story. Granted, not every actor obsessively recorded his life story himself, or went through the trouble of having his head digitally scanned so it could be used after his death, but it would be amazing to see another actor get to tell his or her story this way. Then again, there’s also no guarantee that another actor could have possibly have had a life as endlessly interesting as Brando’s.

Listen To Me Marlon was shortlisted for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar and was nominated for a BAFTA Award. You can catch it on Showtime.