Friday July 02, 2004

BYE BYE BRANDO. Marlon Brando has died, and I am surprised to see the normally astute folks at About Last Night shrugging him off. They seem to think he was tricky and lazy. Well, what's an actor without tricks? I'm reading Anthony Holden's biography of Laurence Olivier. It underlines Lord Larry's gift for the telling stage gesture, which we might also characterize as trickery (or even by the baser term "schtick") were Olivier not so good at it.

But he was, and so in a different way was Brando. He could be straight-up hammy -- see Bedtime Story and The Missouri Breaks. But one of the most potent tools in his arsenal was a sort of outrageous understatement. I remember the first time I saw The Godfather. For the first several minutes I wondered, what the hell is he doing? Ernest Borgnine, one of the actors originally considered for the role, would have been picking pieces of the set out of his teeth by now -- why does Brando look so absent? Then the genius of it struck me: this guy doesn't need to come on heavy -- he's the Godfather. Let the other guys work.

Which may be why some people think was lazy. Brando fed the preception by publicly denigrating the craft of acting on several occasions. But if you listen carefully to his musings on the subject -- like the ones he gave in his wild Larry King interviews -- and compare it to his work, you might see that Brando didn't handle acting with contempt so much as delicacy. He treated his job lightly, not because it wasn't worth his doing, but because he didn't want the souffle to fall.

On the King show Brando insisted that everyone alive acted to a greater or lesser extent every day. Yet some people are more watchable than others. Technique only explains some of that; the rest is a mystery. I think Brando was respectful of that mystery, but tempermentally unsuited to the quasi-mystical gibble-gabble many actors use to describe it (see "Inside the Actor's Studio"). So he made light of it. He had a very lively sense of humor. On the set of The Score, he called the director, Franz Oz, who had worked on Muppet movies, "Miss Piggy," and once told him, "I bet you wish you could stick your hand up my ass and make me do what you want."

On the occasion of his demise I find myself thinking not of The Godfather or A Streetcar Named Desire or Last Tango in Paris, but of the TV miniseries "Roots: The Next Generation," in which Brando shares a brief scene with James Earl Jones -- no slouch himself.

Jones is Alex Haley, and Brando is George Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi Party boss. Haley has come to Nazi HQ to interview the leader for Playboy. Brando's Rockwell is exceedingly flip. Once he gets over his surprise at Haley's blackness -- which seems to affront him because he's been tricked, not because Haley is, by his logic, a subhuman -- he relaxes and explains, with no trace of self-consciousness, that some Negroes are quite intelligent. "Take you, for example," he says, looking dead at Jones. "I enjoy talking to you."

Logically consistent with this, Brando plays Rockwell's contempt for Haley as a black man -- albeit one of the acceptable variety -- by alternately ignoring him and giving outrageous answers as if their offensiveness could not possibly matter. At one point Haley reads from his notepad some damning Rockwell quotes, probing for a response. Brando reaches nonchalantly into a drawer of his desk, pulls out a can of air freshener, sprays it around, and starts giggling. Later, to demonstrate some point, he starts roaring an anti-Semitic parody tune -- "The Jews are through in '72, parlez-vous! /Around their necks we'll tie a bell/and send them all to kosher hell/Hinky dinky... dinky..." He trails off, smiling. "I forget the rest of it."

It all seems very tossed-off and natural. And it makes perfect sense that Haley is sweating profusely by the end.

"Scorches the earth, doesn't he?" Jack Nicholson once observed in a similar context.
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