FAREWELL MARLON BRANDO

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Marlon Brando, who revolutionized American acting with his Method performances in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront and went on to create the iconic characterization of Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather, has died. He was 80.

Brando died of lung failure Thursday evening at UCLA Medical Center, said Roxanne Moster, a spokeswoman for University of California, Los Angeles. She didn't give any details.

Brando, whose unpredictable behavior made him equally fascinating off the screen, was acclaimed the greatest actor of his generation, a two-time winner of the Academy Award who influenced some of the best actors of the generation that followed, among them Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson.

"He influenced more young actors of my generation than any actor," longtime friend and "Godfather" co-star James Caan said today through his publicist. "Anyone who denies this never understood what it was all about."

And

"I am myself," he once declared, "and if I have to hit my head against a brick wall to remain true to myself, I will do it."

Nothing could diminish his reputation as an actor of startling power and invention.

Starting with Kowalski in the stage version of A Streetcar Named Desire and a startling series of screen portrayals, Brando changed the nature of American acting.

Schooled at the Actors Studio in New York, he created a naturalism that was sometimes derided for its mumbling, grungy attitudes. But audiences were electrified, and a new generation of actors adopted his style.

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I didn't really get to see Brando until I was in my thirties. Sure, I saw him sleepwalking through Superman as an emotionally distant Jor-El, but it was only a few years ago that I finally got around to watching A Streetcar Named Desire and The Godfather. I'm sure that I would have loved these two landmark performances if I had seen them at any age, but being a grownup who had formally studied acting years earlier, I was able to marvel at his talent and skill in ways that I couldn't have as an inexperienced youngster. No doubt about it, Brando was great.

I tried to make a point of showing Streetcar to my acting students most of the years that I was a teacher when we studied the concept of emotional memory (which is, in short, an acting technique for when you're just not feeling it in a scene: you try to vividly remember a time in your own life when you felt the same way as your character--sometimes quite useful, but damned difficult to pull off for the uninitiated). There was the usual teenaged bitching about how lame black and white films are, but by the time the film was over, most students had to admit that Brando's Stanley Kowalski was mesmerizing. Brando's image overlooked my classroom for five years on a poster from The Wild One. I wanted my students to remember him. I wanted to remember him.

Brando's influence on American acting was inescapable. A slew of kickass actors who's careers started in the 1960s owe him everything. Pacino, Hoffman, DeNiro, and others are great, but not like Brando: he was the master of this "naturalistic" style of acting. Alas, Brando's influence was not nearly as longlasting as the man himself. Indeed, today television and film are populated with actors who are, when compared to Brando, like the shadows in Plato's cave allegory. That is, so many actors today seem to emulate Brando's style without his substance.

I see so many of my contemporaries who seemingly believe that it is enough to simply feel the feelings of their characters. Of course, real, honest emotion on stage or on screen can be a beautiful thing if utilized in the right way, but I grow tired of this cult of acting-as-therapy that serves as so much mental masturbation. Even Konstantin Stanislavski the great Russian acting teacher who invented emotion-based acting at the turn of the 20th century eventually figured that out. So many actors now seem to have, at least, an instinctive understanding of the importance of emotional honesty in acting, but forget that they are, in the most rudimentary sense, collaborative storytellers.

In other words, all the honest emotion in the world is absolutely useless without service to the overall story that a play or film is trying to tell. That's why Brando was so great: his emotions were real, but he took great care to sublimate all that feeling to the story; Brando studied his scripts in depth, just as his teacher Stella Adler had taught him to do. He had a keen awareness of the entirety of whatever play or film in which he was performing. (Quick aside: I heard his Godfather co-star, Robert Duval, state last night on Larry King that Brando hated his short time at the famous New York acting school, the Actors Studio, headed by acting teacher Lee Strasberg, who, according to many accounts, overemphasized emotional memory's role in acting; Brando greatly preferred Adler, who was more of a thinker. Nowdays, the face of the Actors Studio is the celebrity toady suck-up, James Lipton. Quite fitting, if you ask me.) Compare Brando, or Pacino, or DeNiro, to the standard, inwardly focused, overly emoting film actor...well, actually, there's no comparison to make, really. Brando's characters, when he wasn't simply out for the money, were part of a story--numerous professional actors today are up there all by themselves, lost in their private worlds of deep feeling.

Then there are the bimbos, pretty boys, standup comics, and rap stars, but I'd rather really not go there. They almost make me respect the emotionally masturbatory crowd. Almost. The Matrix is fun and all, but certainly not because of Keanu Reeves' stellar acting.

So farewell Marlon Brando. You helped create a relatively brief, shining moment in the four thousand year history of acting. I only wish your influence could have lasted longer.

Okay, I also wish that I had your talent.


Marlon Brando






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