Writing for actors is a privilege and a pain. Good actors elevate the material, finding truths the writer never intended. But their process, the means by which they are able to breathe life into a character, is an infuriating mystery. Articulate actors rhapsodize about their craft. Honest ones admit not even they can explain how they do it.
That's why writing about acting is so difficult, why biographies of actors so often lapse into celebrity tell-all and about addiction, sex and other irrelevancies unrelated to the actor's talents. And no actor has had as much written about his elusive art as Marlon Brando, who was the greatest actor of his time, or the most overrated -- or both.
"Before Brando, actors acted. After Brando, they behaved," director Michael Winner famously intoned, but Brando's critics only saw bad behavior masquerading as acting. Over a long and tortured career, Brando provided sufficient evidence to support both views.
Stefan Kanfer's new biography, "Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando," is a serious effort to explain the man, his gifts as an actor, his influence on the profession, and how an acting innovator ended up as such a celebrity cliche. As Kanfer makes clear, no one was more perplexed by this trajectory than Brando himself.
Or more conflicted. "What everyone missed," Kanfer argues, ". . . was Marlon's deep-seated ambivalence toward fame, and much more significant, toward acting itself. Was it art? A craft? Or was it just another ego trip, a part of the big American publicity machine?" Brando often disparaged acting as an unseemly con: "Acting is an illusion, a histrionic form of sleight of hand . . . it's a bum's life," he said. On the set, he rarely learned his lines, followed direction or respected his colleagues.
Yet Kanfer argues persuasively that that while Brando lacked discipline and judgment, could be craven when it came to money and cruel when it came to commitments, he believed deeply in the actor's ability to achieve truth, and in so doing, change the world.
Well-researched and beautifully written, the book is as fascinating and frustrating as the subject himself. Not even the gifted Kanfer ("Groucho," "Ball of Fire") can untangle the contradictions and confusions that explain what made Brando great. Whatever it is exists on the screen in Brando's performances, though not always (the man made more turkeys than Louis Rich); like God and obscenity, you know it when you see it.
