There are never fewer than about eight reasons to think about Marlon Brando at any given moment, but right now there are a couple more: it’s 61 years to the day since the release of Elia Kazan‘s peerless “On the Waterfront,” which netted Brando the first of his two Best Actor Oscars, and this week also sees the release of one of the best documentaries of the year, “Listen to Me Marlon.” We’ve had six decades to talk about the brilliance of the first, so a few words about the second, to which we gave a strongly positive review out of the New Directors/New Films Festival, and which, if anything, those of us who’ve seen it since are even more high on.
READ MORE: Watch: Trailer And Clip For Marlon Brando Documentary ‘Listen To Me Marlon’
British director Stevan Riley has previously mounted documentaries on the James Bond franchise, international cricket and the annual Oxford/Cambridge boxing match, but little can really prepare you for the sheer intelligence and craft that has gone into his formally rigorous, astonishingly intimate portrait of this screen legend. Using his unprecedented access to many hours of taped interviews, confessionals and archive footage, much of which has never been seen before (he had the unfettered co-operation of the Brando estate), Riley has built an utterly compelling, resonant, sustaining film using almost nothing but Brando’s own words. It’s a peculiarly philosophical, melancholic and beautiful piece of work, all the more remarkable for diving so deep beneath the skin of one of the most intimidatingly mythologized actors ever to have strolled onto a film set. As such, it’s the rare cinematic biodoc that has a kind of universality that makes it powerful to outsiders, to non-fans, even to those who may be actively wary of the posthumous lionization, almost the deification of Brando as the Actor’s Godhead.