COMMENTARY : Marlon Brando--What Might Have Been

The immense Mafioso, shrouded in shadow, tips a tiny cup of espresso between his thick fingers and lifts his face into the light.

Are we watching Marlon Brando in “The Godfather”? Not exactly. It’s Brando as Carmine Sabatini, the ganglord in “The Freshman.” But the voice, the magisterial mannerisms, are virtually the same as Don Corleone’s.

Considering the fact that Brando has acted in exactly one other movie since 1980, this Godfather-recap seems at first glimpse a sorry joke--a cashing in on a former glory. But look again at the performance. Far from being a retread, it’s a scrupulously witty and deeply felt comic turn.

Throughout his career Brando has often been accused of self-parody. In “The Freshman,” it’s as if he decided to one-up his critics by proving he can make fun of himself and still rule the screen. We’re watching not a self-trashing but an artfully articulated self-parody. And the self being parodied is so protean that the joke has more dramatic force than most seriously intended performances.

Brando’s work in “The Freshman” doesn’t make you long for a talent long lost. The talent is still triumphantly on view, just as it was last year in his cameo as the hammy, Dickensian lawyer in “A Dry White Season.” But seeing Brando yet again in the space of a year makes you long for more of his richness. He’s still America’s greatest actor. His self-imposed semi-retirement since the late ‘70s is an aesthetic deprivation of fabled proportions, comparable to Lillian Gish’s near-absence from sound films, the great Garbo’s disappearance from the screen after 1941, and, with it, the loss of her superb soulfulness, her lyrical world-weariness, or Orson Welles’ ravaged, crazy-quilt career.

Like Welles, Brando came upon the theatrical scene with such flourish, and displayed the ferocity of his talent so early, that it may have been impossible for him to entirely live up to what was expected of him. On the heels of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “On the Waterfront,” we expected him to revolutionize screen acting (which he did) and initiate a half-century of masterpieces (which he manifestly did not ).

If we now regard Brando as a tragic case, the source of the tragedy is mixed. His career is a demonstration of Hollywood’s inability to accommodate its most maverick artists. It’s also the story of a great actor who cared far less about his genius than his legions of admirers has.

Rod Steiger was once quoted as saying, “Marlon was in a unique position. He could have done anything , however difficult or uncommercial, on the screen and taken the critics, the industry, the fans with him. But he didn’t choose to. I don’t know why.”

Right from the beginning of his movie career, Brando had the great good fortune to be both actor and movie star. Although he may have disdained the stardom, it did have one practical advantage--he could pretty much call his own shots. The movie star in Hollywood is in a preeminent creative position, which is ironic, since movie stars not infrequently are far less creative than those actors who aren’t. (Many movie stars have locked-in personae that restrict their risk-taking.) Unlike even star directors and producers, movie stars can get movies made . To a far greater degree than most film actors, Brando’s career is largely of his own making.

However, to the extent that Brando is not altogether responsible for this situation, the blame can perhaps be leveled at Hollywood’s homogenizing effect on its artists, especially the Hollywood of the ‘50s and early ‘60s--a particularly unadventurous period for movies when Brando’s star wattage was at its brightest. Brando may have represented to the public a new-style outcast, a Method rebel whose tough-tender sensitivities made him “the Valentino of the bop generation.”

But he was far too dynamic to be pigeonholed into any torn T-shirt persona, and far more versatile than his Anglophilic detractors maintained. (He was a highly creditable Marc Antony in “Julius Caesar”; by contrast, try to imagine Sir John Gielgud as Stanley Kowalski in “ A Streetcar Named Desire.”)

In films like “On the Waterfront” Brando suggested a wholly new kind of balled-up American grace; his contortions, his reaching for eloquence, had an imploring quality that was far more rapturous and tragic in its implications than anything the more traditionally stage-oriented movie actors were attempting. Brando’s force in his early films demanded not just great roles, but the particular kind of great role that would express what was drastically new about Brando’s artistry. And Hollywood was not geared up to fulfill his genius. When he should have been burning up the screen he could be found in “ Sayonara,” “The Teahouse of the August Moon,” “The Young Lions,” “Mutiny on the Bounty,” “The Appaloosa.”

Brando, alas, was probably not geared up to fulfill his own genius, either. Part of the reason for this can perhaps be explained by a quote of his: “Acting is an empty and useless profession, it’s a bum’s life. Quitting acting, that’s the sign of maturity.” Leaving aside whatever acids of personal grief and humiliation may be etched into such a statement, Brando’s quote is nevertheless practically a paradigm of how many of our most gifted actors (particularly middle-aged actors) view their profession. From George C. Scott to Paul Newman to Robert Redford, we have heard how acting is not, in essence, a fit occupation for a grown man.

These actors may embody for millions the most tensile masculine fantasies, but the acting profession itself they regard apologetically, as if there were something feminizing about the process of making yourself over into someone else. (The converse “truth” frequently voiced in show business is that women, unlike men, are innately suited to acting.) And so we are repeatedly made aware of the social causes to which these actors are attached, of the socially conscious themes in their movies, as if this would condone for us their fabulously lucrative play-acting.

And yet many of these same actors have been responsible for some of the most exciting performances in modern film, and most of them are still in the fray. Brando himself, despite his professed loathing of acting, gave great performances in films like “Reflections in a Golden Eye” and “The Nightcomers” at a time in his career (the late ‘60s-early ‘70s) when he was practically given up for good by audiences and even most critics. What made Brando’s disparagement of his profession unique was that ultimately it resulted in virtual retirement, and on the heels, no less, of his great “comeback” roles in “The Godfather” and “The Last Tango in Paris.”

It’s possible that, even if Brando had continued to act throughout the ‘70s, the current generation of young filmgoers would not have connected him to the roles that made him famous. How many of the 18- to 25 year-old audience have seen “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “On the Waterfront”? Or, even more to the point, “Last Tango in Paris” and “The Godfather”?

For most young moviegoers, film history doesn’t extend back much beyond a decade--at best. It’s not just Brando I’m including here; the same thing holds true for, say, Dustin Hoffman, who is primarily known to young audiences for “Rain Man” and not for “The Graduate,” or even “Tootsie.” Jack Nicholson is essentially the Joker to the new audience. When “The Two Jakes” opens Aug. 10, it will play for them as if “Chinatown” had never happened. How many in the “core” audience for “Dick Tracy” know Warren Beatty from “Bonnie & Clyde” and “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” and “Shampoo”? If they know of him at all, it’s most likely as Madonna’s consort.

There’s talk that Brando will appear in David Lean’s “Nostromo” (if the financing for that long-delayed film can be found). He still wants to make his long-planned epic about the American Indian. Is it possible that his current re-emergence is his way of acquainting himself with an entirely new generation of young moviegoers for whom he is only a dim legend--in order to amass the kind of clout that would allow him to make his dream project?

Whatever the reason for his return, it’s beyond contention that Brando still has his greatness, and must keep on working. He’s reentered the movie arena at a time when actors like Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro--his heirs--are rotating out of their own self-imposed exiles and starting to juice the screen again. If Brando’s bulk prohibits him from taking on a wide range of roles, still, that never stopped Charles Laughton, did it? There probably isn’t a first-class screenwriter or director in the world who wouldn’t be willing to let out the seams in his imagination in order to fit Brando. They know he casts the biggest shadow of all.