"I Swallowed a Bug"
Now Playing: R.I.P. Marlon Brando
Unless you've been asleep since Thursday night, you've no doubt heard that Marlon Brando has passed away. As with the death of any cinematic legend, Brando's passing is a reminder that movie stars are as human as the rest of us, despite their widespread impact on popular culture. Few actors of the past half-century have made the impact that Brando did within his lifetime. In his early years as an actor, he was the leading edge of the Method, a movement which introduced raw emotion to the once highly cultivated art of acting, and which enabled Hollywood cinema to segue from escapist stories of the well-to-do into more gritty working-class dramas. His performances in A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE and ON THE WATERFRONT were incendiary for their time, and remain powerful even today. Brando remains the defining example of the original Method generation, an inspiration on not only his peers but also on future generations, from future costars DeNiro and Pacino to current young turks like Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, and Mark Ruffalo.

However, the legacy of Brando the prodigy is only half the story. The other half is of Brando the nut, the flake, the recluse. Having been born after Brando's middle-age triumphs of the early 1970s, my first impressions of the man were in his later years, after bloat and rot had set in. I still remember his infamous Larry King appearance, as he gorged himself on cactus cookies and rested his chubby feet on a little hassock, And although I had already seen most of his most legendary turns by that time, it was still difficult to rectify the weirdo star turn of THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU with the man's legend.

And yet, rectify we must, because in order to fully understand and appreciate Marlon Brando we must learn to see the genius and the kook as being two halves of the same coin. If the greatest of Brando's peers could be labeled, Paul Newman would be the survivor, the talented and charismatic star who reckoned with the system and came out on top. James Dean was the martyr, who made a dent in the public's consciousness but died either too soon to realize his full potential or at exactly the right time to solidify his legend. Montgomery Clift was the tortured genius, whose formidable talent (arguably the greatest of his time) couldn't manage to defeat his demons.

By contrast, Brando's career resists such convenient categories. His dire period in the early 1960s was largely a product of unwillingness to give himself over to his craft, and most of his later work was devoted to subverting the films in which he appeared. Yet he was still talented and always capable of surprising us, in films such as A DRY WHITE SEASON and THE FRESHMAN.

I believe that Brando was a great actor not in spite of his strangeness, but rather because of it. The same mind behind the bucket-headed Dr. Moreau was the one that so gently caressed his brother's gun away in ON THE WATERFRONT. The method of the Method was to draw on one's personal resources to formulate a performance, and as such Brando didn't grab such diverse actions from thin air. A visionary is one who is able to see possibilities where others cannot, and if the possibilities explored in Brando's performances grew more inexplicable over time, perhaps we simply weren't ready for them.

In retrospect, the Marlon Brando performance that most fully encapsulates both sides of his career can be found in what I believe to be his greatest film, Bernardo Bertolucci's LAST TANGO IN PARIS. Brando allegedly was granted a great deal of input into his character, Paul, an expatriate whose wife had recently committed suicide, and indeed a rundown of his former jobs sounds like a list of early Brando roles- a boxer, a revolutionary, etc. As the film progresses, his unmistakable largeness and dominating presence give way to a real sense of vulnerability, as he becomes more and more dominated by the personality of Jeanne, the woman he meets for anonymous sex under the pretense that he's actually the dominant figure. The film is full of raw sexuality, as Brando's brute force figures heavily into the couple's encounters, but it's the final sequences that are the most uncomfortable in the film. Paul realizes he's in love with Jeanne and wants to make her a real part of his new life, but she isn't comfortable with the idea, and his behavior becomes more erratic the more desperate he gets. And yet, even in the end, after making an ass of himself at a dancehall and stalking Jeanne back to her flat, Brando still allows for delicacy in the characterization, when at the moment of truth Paul takes a beat and parks his gum underneath a railing. An action that says nothing, and yet everything, about the character and the man who created him.

Marlon Brando, you'll be missed. Even your imitators would agree that there'll never be another.