Maybe he just didn't want to do it any more. Maybe making 40 movies was enough for Marlon Brando, who as everyone knows died July 1 at age 80. Maybe he'd done everything he wanted to do; he did make five or six films that will last forever, and how many movies last forever? Maybe it had stopped being fun.
Or maybe we just expected too much of him, read too much into his work, wanted -- no, demanded -- too much. Certainly most of his obituaries that I read this week were too much for me to bear. My colleagues at newspapers far and wide clucked and hectored and tut-tutted their pen nibs to pieces over Brando's lost promise and his gained weight. "He could have been so much more," they whined -- ironically, in stories that started on the front page and spilled over onto full spreads inside, stories of a prominence reserved for world leaders.
What did people want from him that he didn't give? More? Well, guess what -- people always want more. It's no coincidence that the true megastars blimp up or dope out in the face of all our white-hot need, implode like Judy Garland or Michael Jackson, explode like Elvis Presley or Elizabeth Taylor or Brando himself. Their physiognomies take on the bloat of our demands.
Brando was absurdly beautiful and massively talented and grandly weird. And maybe he chose to haul himself off to remote islands and gain epic amounts of weight and spit in the face of the movies while accepting gargantuan paydays for lousy cameos.
But it makes perfect sense in light of the unconventional characters he played and the unconventional person he always was, whose very lack of conventions was the main quality we claimed to revere -- when we weren't clucking and tut-tutting about it.
Maybe the scripts he was getting really weren't that great. Maybe he had things he'd rather do. But we wouldn't let him, we wanted more. Say you got sick of your job, but some boss was fool enough to pay you $1-million for a day's work -- would you say no?
Maybe he got sick of our movie-star moralizing, the way we as a culture hoist actors onto pedestals, pelt things at them until they fall down, and then delightedly discuss the style, impact and meaning of the topple. We want stars like Brando to live for us, to be better than we are, more daring and wild and sexy and iconoclastic -- but only so much, not too much now, or we punish them.
Certainly no actor has thumbed his nose more ostentatiously at his fans, bitten the hands that fed him more openly. I never met Brando, but over the years I've talked to a few people he worked with, and they all describe the same quality: He would be eccentrically devoted if he liked you, cruelly indifferent if he didn't. He liked the roués, Johnny Depp, Val Kilmer, both of whom know their stuff and know how to shut up. And both of whom -- not coincidentally, I'm sure -- have absented themselves from the Hollywood fray, living in France and New Mexico, making the movies they feel like making, against all well-meaning, soul-deadening advice from agents and their ilk.
"Brando never quit," said Depp, who worked with Brando on Don Juan DeMarco.
"He removed himself. Admirable move. There's a good possibility I'll do that."
The film Kilmer made with Brando, The Island of Dr. Moreau, was a colossal stinker. The actors feuded with director John Frankenheimer every day. "John wasn't at fault for coming and insisting on shooting the script he was hired to do," Kilmer said. "It wasn't his responsibility to put his career on the line and fight with New Line. But Brando worked only that way. I'd say to John, 'Do you think if Coppola, Kazan -- list any of the directors that Brando's eaten alive -- do you think if they couldn't reach him, that you're going to, this late in the game, and he will do exactly what you say, with enthusiasm and joy? He'll do it, he's showing up, but what's the point?' "
At one fractious juncture with Frankenheimer, Kilmer turned to Brando and asked, "Marlon, have you ever been accused of being who your character is?"
Brando replied, "What are you talking about?" Kilmer asked again, "Have you ever been accused of acting like the character you're playing?" Brando didn't understand. Kilmer tried various phrases -- have you been confused with your character, have you been called difficult when really it's your character who is -- but Brando kept sputtering, becoming upset. Finally he said to Kilmer, "I don't understand what you're asking, 'Have you ever?' It happens every day of my life."
During the making of The Freshman, co-star Penelope Ann Miller told me, Brando knew that the producer, Mike Lobell, and the director, Andrew Bergman, lived in fear that he would leave the Toronto set and never come back. So Brando called Lobell late one evening and told him he was on a plane to Tahiti with Frank Sinatra; there was static on the line, and the sound of airplane engines. "Lobell and Bergman were in a panic: 'Oh my God, he's left the country, he's never coming back, what are we going to do?' " Miller said. Hours later, at about 2 a.m., Brando phoned back laughing like a hyena. He'd been in his room at the Sutton Place Hotel all along. He'd tape-recorded the engine sounds, "just to bust our chops," Miller said.
Francis Ford Coppola hired burly body-builders to carry Brando's stretcher in The Godfather, which offended Brando slightly -- he wasn't that heavy then; part of Don Corleone's heft was padding. But he paid Coppola back. He carried concealed weights on the stretcher, so that even the body-builders would have trouble hoisting him. They never said a word, but they were breaking into sweats, the veins popping on their necks, their faces turning bright red. Brando thought it was hilarious.
Above all, Brando was an instincts guy. He trusted his, and he wanted that respected. Miller remembers with reverence one day on The Freshman when she, Matthew Broderick and Bruno Kirby were gathered in Brando's trailer, listening to him talk about a scene he'd once filmed, this little scene in a cab, and how it worked in the end because he'd insisted on trusting his instincts. "He was talking about it like it was a film we would never have heard of, and it turns out it was the 'I could have been a contender' scene from On the Waterfront," Miller said.
Brando told them that the director, Elia Kazan, wanted him to play the scene as if his character, Terry Malloy, feared for his life; that he was to be desperate and angry, to cower from his brother Charley when Charley threatened him. But Brando didn't see the scene that way. He wanted to play it that Terry was only sorry that Charley had been put in that position.
They shot it twice, once Kazan's way and once Brando's. "Obviously, what ended up in the movie was Brando's instinct, playing it pathetic and disappointed and hurt and beautiful," Miller said. "I remember that just as he got to the climax of this story, they were knocking on his trailer door, 'Ready on the set!' And we were all like, 'Can you wait just one more minute, we've got a really important thing going on in here.' "
Brando had things going on. That they weren't always important to his bosses or fans was not his concern. He owes us nothing more. He gave us more than enough.
Johanna Schneller