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Désirée

Indifference was in many ways Brando’s defining quality, even from the start. In his initial roles, gently smudging dialogue and fixing lines on the fly, it was an indifference to the confines of the material, and to any of the silver-screen conventions his swift ascendance into the Hollywood firmament obligated him to respect. This naturally entailed an indifference to the reflex resistance of the numerous conservative guardians of those conventions, which evolved into an indifference to their subsequent expectation from him his distinct inaugural style (as with old, reliable types like Clark Gable or Humphrey Bogart, whom Brando compared to breakfast cereals – the various but artistically stationary consumer options of yesteryear’s megahits). Opting to do Viva Zapata! and Julius Caesar, Brando semi-wittingly preempted accusations of repeating himself when The Wild One and On the Waterfront drew a line from the boorish, decorum-bucking heartthrob he got famous playing. Still, you can follow a familiar passion through all of his first six roles. With Désirée, he disposes of this continuity. The indifference he brought to his seventh picture isn’t the kind which later compelled him into amusing caricature or delighted subversion. Though there’s a trace impishness the opulent Cinemascope context divulges, Désirée marks the genesis of the worst iteration of Brando’s indifference – wherein he simply cares so little, so clearly, for the film he’s in, he doesn’t even try. He’s at perfect liberty, particularly being as young and trim (though there are bourgeoning hints of his famous fluctuations) as he is here, to harness that incomparable energy with which he animates his best roles’ epiphanies, and transform it into spry fun. But Brando seems to have imprisoned himself in eccentric fashion here. Having begun with physical choices clearly concocted as a joke on his own role, he seems unable to do much with them, for fear of violating his one hard rule: breaking character. So he mostly glowers, while the massive-budget trifle around him waltzes along, and his costar sifts out a perfect exculpatory liveliness. As well as marking the beginning of his albatross boredom, Désirée was the first of Brando’s roles he didn’t specifically choose. Ever the iconoclast, he’d become one of the first actors to regularly dodge the studio system’s preference for multiple-picture indenturing. An admitted skimmer of fine print, in 1953 Brando suddenly found himself obligated to a part in The Egyptian from his work on the Fox-produced Viva Zapata!. He discovered his lack of interest in this instantaneously. Typically unconcerned with the ramifications of simply walking away, he ran into a lawsuit, and came out of it obliged to portray Napoleon. Why a part like that – humility hardly being Brando’s defining quality, and Napoleon being notorious for a certain contra-courtly loutishness – shouldn’t strike Brando as a heaven-match is a mystery. But the likelihood is that an insecure star (who’d claim expertise as a director manipulator later, but must not’ve known how here) deduced he was chained to a turkey, and checked out. Even if straight-faced, elephantine period extravaganzas weren’t especially anomalous at the time, audiences of brows both high and low had few pretenses about Désirée Brando lacked. Sourced from a bestselling novel equipped with torrid romance and a rags-to-riches hook, the film did unexceptional business and only drew Oscar nods for costume design and art direction, and in its utterly unrestrained way you can figure it deserved them. Though Désirée is patently unremarkable, no culprit is at exclusive fault for its failure. The script, by From Here to Eternity’s Daniel Taradash, is sparsely littered with amusing lines, but lacks profundity or an inspired sense of structure. The director, Henry Koster, was an apparent master at manufacturing mediocrity – his previous film, and the very first to use Cinemascope at all, was the noted bloated nothing The Robe, and his few other popular works (The Bishop’s Wife, Harvey) are thin and uninventive. Désirée’s supporting cast is for the most part banal and lackluster as well, with Michael Rennie the foremost vacant lot amid the grandeur. So you’re grateful for how deftly and immediately Jean Simmons’ work cuts through the lavishness and bombast. As the title character, you can conceive of her deciding that just a little more depended on her success than her legend-in-his-own-time costar’s. From her first cheeky moments, she conjures an addictive, irrepressible sparkle. Brando’s lost chance to match this resonates through their every exchange – as a tale about a déclassé debutante who nearly weds Napoleon and ascends by happenstance to the role of Queen of Sweden, a good deal of the script directly explores how foolish it is to value propriety at all. Indeed, Désirée and Napoleon speak of this constantly, and of the fatal restraint which ruins their own abortive courtship. Yet somehow Brando either couldn’t or wasn’t interested in locating the relevance to his own situation. And though Pauline Kael claimed to detect “a conspiratorial charm” between the stars, only Simmons seems to be doing any work to bring this plot to fruition. Most remarkable about Simmons’ portrayal, though, is how she brings it all off without seeming incongruous – except against some of the weaker support, like the awful John Hoyt (who does nothing at all to conceal his coarse American accent among the transatlantic “cahn’t stahnd him” stuff, except when he takes Désirée’s accents aigu seriously, as in “Dayzaray”). That she weaves this energy so seamlessly into the proceedings without ruffling its heavy garments exposes the sorry copout of Brando’s palpably genuine impudence. Gesturing wispily toward pseudo-British dialect, adopting a proto-Don Corleone rasp for no obvious reason, and never lifting the brow he glowers and glowers under, Brando comes off like a low-prospect theatre major. The movie really isn’t as leaden as you’d fear; you’ll titter more than once, and due to the throwaway briskness of its exposition and transitions, its two hours almost attain a kind of momentum. But Brando is just burdensome, and he drags it back down – is there anything less exciting than a sulking prankster? You do see our man begin to rise to the occasion when he detects resistance in his scene partners – not genuine resistance, of course, though one suspects Michael Rennie was among his rotating early purveyors of older-guard impatience. Sparring with Rennie (next to Klaatu, he really does look like Napoleon) finds Brando a good deal more awake, even interested – but Rennie gives him little to deploy a substantive response to. You observe the same shades of vitality when his scenes with Désirée grow fractious. Only then do we detect his sensuality manifesting itself. Yet by that time, he’s frustrated us, because she’s consistently offered flesh-and-blood playfulness and cleverness, finding vivacity in her own dialogue any way she can, while the mastermind before her is ruminating at some remote point between sleepwalking and goofing off. Vexing as you’d assume this disparity to be, the two actors had no lost love from the experience, reuniting with undeniably better results on his very next movie. The pair shared an independent spirit in an oppressively formal era. It is perhaps the film’s own oppressive formality which kept Brando’s easily wounded pride insulated from provocations into greater self-respect. He does look ridiculous in that cape and all his giant hats, though I can’t imagine he was forced into constantly adopting that painterly, leg-out pose (“why do they keep standing like that?”, asked my partner, reading my mind). Only in those few moments he has a direct opportunity to mischief is his vigor evidently restored, like when he gets to put out candles with his fingertips, or wrap his fop accent around the word “chuckleheads”. He just seems tired otherwise, the most lugubrious thing in a picture that somehow narrowly escapes the condition. He would be much savvier burlesquing dandies later on, while here he’s merrily and easily bested by Alan Napier in his silver coat and yellow pants. Unable to shake off his reasons to pout, we witness Brando’s sorriest incarnation here: he isn’t interesting. And though his aesthetic anarchism was only mounting, it would later take a lot more for Brando to completely throw a performance away. film: C+ // Brando: C

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why we’re here

Every once in an extended while, my time carousel sees me back at one of three chief creative conceits, each of which I have about a jack/master aptitude for – I audition for a show I feel inclined to perform in, bag it on more occasions than not (due more, I’m sure, to savvy selectivity than ineffable brilliance), and get to act my heart out for two or so months. When this particular hunger strikes, I’m a little more discerning than a relative local and total national nonentity is probably entitled to be. I never audition for musicals, and I avoid the sort of stylized comedy whose illumination depends on that tense and tactile physical control for which we treasure so many different performers. This isn’t because I dislike either type; like any sane lover of art, I adore both if well-executed, and typically, if they’re being put on at all beyond high school, the cast and crew come fairly equipped for such stuff. As a sometime self-styled critic, I frequently marvel at strokes of these varieties. As a sometime self-styled actor, however, both are a bit beyond my reach and my preference. As it happens, I share these aversions with the screen performer I hope hardest to emulate whenever I try my hand at his trade. And as for the kinds of parts I do seek, he’s at the forefront of my mind too. My personal gold standard of acting, which I’ve found is seen as somewhat eccentric in regional context, is what I imagine to be most people’s gold standard in a broader context, and when they choose to think about acting at all: an evocation of reality, in all its mess and livewire unpredictability; a cocktail of arrhythmic emotional waves, bursting with responses apt enough to feel like the actor’s own. When it comes to theatre and film (which includes TV today), I regard no achievement greater than a performance in which actor and role become virtually indiscernible. Even if you have no inkling what the actor is like offstage, my ideal form of acting is the sort where you can’t imagine the human in front of you behaving any differently. Absolute, seamless naturalism, pass before you though jarring and unusual emotional extremes may. This impermeable commitment is necessary in your farces and your operas as well. But hyper human vérité is a flavor of performance I prefer the way I do coconut. I believe, too, that even as one mustn’t suggest a comparative denigration of those decidedly non-vérité forms, there is something of a golden mean quality to what I’m detailing. And when Marlon Brando first brought this sort of acting to the screen, history knows the liberation from all of that recycled cinematic convention was seismic. He wasn’t fluke enough to be the genuine first, of course – many people found theretofore-unseen magic ducking around expectations before our eyes, piercing those heavy (or corny) handed-down hands borne from decades of feeling into a fledgling and formerly voiceless medium. Even more than in small doses sometimes; Brando singled out Eleonora Duse and James Cagney, and if you’re a cinephile you’ve got your own few in mind. But Brando broke that barrier as forcefully and undeniably as Chuck Yeager, or Chuck Berry a few art forms over. Not only did he make such acting fashionable, he made it his calling, one which he honored almost slavishly (though he could be thrillingly novel circumventing it). To the historical chauvinism by which he wins this championship title, you can add American chauvinism too; well before obvious signposts like De Sica, overseas filmmakers and their actors proved to possess a firmer finger on these buttons. And of course, being the first famous realist actor on celluloid is speedily dwarfed by thoughts of centuries of stage performers – not to mention those teachers to whom Brando owed his inspiration, from the incomparable Stella Adler on up the line through Stanislavski. (As he himself would hasten to qualify, I refer to more than the often superficially tricksy “method” stuff.) But even today, when he’s been bested performance for performance by so many people, Brando’s strides, his conviction, avidity, fervor and jazz-like instincts, reverberate meaningfully enough to earn perennial gratitude. Even given the stale trappings of his early, mythmaking work, which weakens it a little now, one shudders to imagine the tradition evolving without his effort, ascendency, and influence. Of course, realism wasn’t the only thing on his résumé. As much as a desire to get it right, his inclination to the style was fueled by a desire to resist any encumberment he encountered – not even the result of oppressive genesis (though having two kinds of alcoholic parent, one loving but distant and one present but angry, can’t be a cakewalk) but an innate waggishness from which he drew his joy and energy. The suburbs in which Brando came of age weren’t unpleasant, but they were complacent and artificial, much like the tenor of the times. A youngster bursting with his immeasurable levels of curiosity and passion had only disruption in his fingertips, and having discovered he had no taste for destruction or foolishness, art was perhaps his only available salvation. Acting is the creative medium you throw yourself most literally into, and for an undisciplined, yet physically strong and clearly inspired, individual such as Brando it was a tailor fit, even as he consistently insisted he only did it out of base financial necessity and an absence of any other obvious natural talents. So we can easily conceive of how a lust for truth and an urge to resist merged to instigate his 1950s rise as a paragon of believable acting. But, though he lacked Meryl Streep or Daniel Day-Lewis’s finesse for detail when he went for pastures outside those he could summon within the skin he inhabited, Brando loved character work, and when we watch him attempt various accents or hide inside makeup choices, we come with him, witness the other half of his magnetism – he’s fun when he tosses any recognizable self aside, because it allows his madcap streak, his why-not puckishness, to flower untrammeled. Many critics bemoaned how recklessly Brando seemed to be skirting playing the clown, and he wasn’t afraid to be caught not trying. But fopping around in an obvious miss like the Mutiny of the Bounty remake was, however aesthetically wanting, a more valid punk gesture than anything he conveyed (or simulated) in The Wild One. Certainly, he flopped, sometimes hugely. But unlike at least one bazillionaire progeny, he couldn’t bore you if he tried. Despite his claims to eventual mellowness, which he might well have privately enjoyed in his later days, Brando’s notorious pugnacity, or its legend anyway, grew the way his body did. Thirteen years after his death, and considerably longer after his last great work (well – we’ll get to that argument), it’s not hard to recall, even as Johnny Depp faintly, ineptly retraces it, just how badly Brando encrusted himself in his own insistent eccentricity, for so long up to his passing. Forget Pauline Kael’s very early (1966) eulogy to his own control over his volcanic gifts and image. After the twin peaks of The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris (Apocalypse Now is a whole other matter), what was formerly a cute game he concocted to cope with unprecedented fame and admiration rapidly mutated into an onanistic circus of disagreeable quirk. Even in his self-identified “Fuck You Years”, Brando maintained a commitment to a handful of his ideals. After finally unburdening himself of charm, all that remained was that compulsive resistance to any authority. But grotesque as Brando might seem revisiting what he became (and I mean as a human being, even as those final vestiges of sex appeal disappeared under poor health), only the pugnacity and some of the pretensions – odd to imagine how a lack thereof was his first gilded calling card – truly scuff the image. True, he had strange ways of treating and referring to women and Jews. But these two groups would seem to be the only two subject to lapses in his otherwise magnanimous attunement to demographic disadvantages. And he loved and admired both, from his ingrained distance; the only on-record reference to physical abuse against women in his career (besides “shoving” stalkers and unwanted pursuers) is his defending his mother from his father after Marlon Brando Sr. had vented his odious rage. Brando’s Pop seems to have been the only living thing he hated*. From small animals to every race or culture ever to find itself America’s victim, Brando was a tireless and unafraid defender of the sort of underdog he understood he never genuinely was. When a former miracle among mankind tumbles backward into their own freakshow, it tends, especially in this era, to be all we focus on once the last breath leaves the lips – think of his genius pal Michael Jackson, who was a disfigured paranoiac for much longer than he was a smooth, soulful sweetheart, and their mutual friend Elizabeth Taylor, almost unrecognizably boozy and bedraggled for practically as long as she was ravishing and respected. In fact, all three of these troubled icons share something special – an inspiring doggedness in the face of torrents of unmerited mockery, years after the proof of their respective wonders had waned and given way to a thirst for freedom, from an exhausting, inescapable legendary status. Well-compensated as they were, none of these people were allowed normal lives, and all exhibited the brand of toll that only someone of such enormous cultural import can comprehend. In this reflexively polemical age, they deserve a more dignified collective recollection. This blog couldn’t fuel Brando’s third alone – an even less important, less public gesture than the times I’ve stepped on a stage and tried to nail it like he did, and I don’t mean in a James Dean way (those are different strands of I-should-be-so-lucky). When I think of Brando, or when I strive to conjure similar intentions and outcomes, I think of how synoptically this self-proclaimed career liar cared about truth – as much as Hemingway, with a far less coarse course of pursuit. This was a man who steadfastly refused to vitiate his characters with bad dialogue, brainless effects, or lapses in logic. One whose care for the audience, which wasn’t always obvious, entailed a belief that they’d be able to see through any bullshit in any performance, any trace of trying, any betrayal of consistency and slip from integrity. “The actor is the boss”, Adler once declaimed with Olivier bombast, and as a person who knew how corrupt such unbridled power could become, Brando tended to that role with a remarkable, reverential grace. Stuffed as this intro entry is with overtures to encapsulation, all of Brando’s accomplishments, contradictions and unclassifiable quirks can only be adequately explored by way of the plan at hand: to experience and analyze the canon – forty wildly diverse onscreen performances over the span of a half a century – and to invite you to raise the discussion to whatever heights I can’t. Per my catchy (eh?) title, we are refusing to take the straight path through this journey. I figure that’s as apposite a tribute to the old master as anything. *not counting paparazzi