Early in the filming, Brando noticed an actor from the Dominican Republic, Nelson de la Rosa, with a genetic mutation, who was two and a half feet tall and weighed twenty-two pounds. De la Rosa had been outfitted in a loincloth with a tail, which Brando found demeaning. So Brando made de la Rosa his sidekick, beside him in nearly every scene, dressed identically.89 The choice may have represented an ironic recognition of his own needs. Stars typically had entourages, but Brando was especially prone to sidekicks—friends with various forms of expertise in the film industry who became attached to him and benefited from the association. He gave them jobs (as actors, extras, speech coaches, makeup artists, even directors) and they gave him the constancy and loyalty he craved. While the individuals changed over the years, between Manhattan and Hollywood, some remained with him almost to the end of his career. Whatever the rewards, however, the experience of being Brando’s sidekick had distinct disadvantages. All of them were diminished by proximity to his stardom, and many, over time, did things to diminish him in return. Through the relationship of Dr. Moreau and Nelson de la Rosa’s character of Majai, Brando seems to have imagined an ideal version of the curious interdependence between the dominant, domineering man and the buddy, whose job is to placate, humor, and entertain the stronger partner. Like Lear and his fool, they are as essential to one another as water and air.90
Brando with Nelson de la Rosa on the set of Dr. Moreau. (Brando’s friend Philip Rhodes stands to his left.) © Avra Douglas/courtesy of Avra Douglas.
The main concern of The Island of Dr. Moreau was progeny and inheritance, and Brando’s personal life appears also to have found its way into the film here. All of the human animal hybrids on the island bear Moreau’s DNA, but the most highly evolved are three sons and a daughter who have been crossed with domestic animals. Literate, formally dressed, Aissa (Fairuza Balk) and M’Ling (Marco Hofschneider) are part feline; Azazello (Temuera Morrison) and Waggdi (Miguel Lopez) are part canine. The doctor has seen to their training and cultivation, the lovely Aissa’s in particular. When the leopard man, Lo-Mai (Mark Dacascos), stands trial for slaughtering a rabbit (vegetarianism is compulsory on Moreau’s island; killing is a power reserved for the doctor), Azazello, the eldest “son,” with an appetite for the hunt, steps in and shoots Lo-Mai after Moreau has granted the creature clemency—a moment that replicates, eerily, Christian Brando’s shooting of Dag Drollet. The parallels between Dr. Moreau’s daughter, the object of every male eye, and Brando’s precious Cheyenne, whose death must have weighed on him, were also striking. Brando rarely played a father on film—his lone previous exception was The Godfather—and the decision to assume the role of a diabolical patriarch at a time when his own family life was in such disarray exemplifies an extraordinary confluence of private and public experience.
However affected he was by the overlapping issues, Brando had periods during which he relaxed. He took characteristic pleasure in communing with Australian wildlife. Ever playful, he turned pages of scripted dialogue into paper airplanes and launched them from the balcony of his hotel room. He enjoyed creating Moreau’s persona: shaving his head and eyebrows; fashioning buckteeth and the pasty-white coating for Moreau’s skin, to protect him from the thinning of the ozone layer; selecting the colorful costumes that were all replicated for de la Rosa’s Majai. Brando’s Moreau is another mannered Brit who cloaks ambition in affectation. Ice bucket on head, munching on greens, Bach in the background, he tells Aissa, as she massages his shoulders, that he is “simply going to perish from the heat.” His response to her fears about reversion is similarly quaint. “You’re an absolute angel,” he says. “You’re beautiful inside, you’re beautiful outside.” His laughter at her wish to look like him produces a full-fanged smile. His techniques of persuasion prove less effective with the bestial offspring that invade his lair. He tells them that their piano banging reminds him of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music, anxious humoring that belabors the distance between the effete scientist and his monsters. Moreau’s genteel terror upon discovering that a gruesome death is imminent is marvelously conveyed. While the film was a mess, Brando still had his moments delivering what was termed, in an otherwise damning review, “an affectionate caricature of British ham acting.”91 But personal trauma had aged him, and his sadness was patent. Sheer toughness got him through the shoot.
Conversing with a parrot. © Avra Douglas/courtesy of Avra Douglas.
Critical reaction to the film was scathing, with the exception of a few critics who enjoyed watching Brando reprise the role that Charles Laughton had played in Island of Lost Souls (1932). In the 1990s, when Brando had grown accustomed to ridicule, he expected that his villains would be misunderstood, even reviled.92 Whether or not a film was well received, he almost always had his pleasures on a set. The invitation for the “Pain No More Party” he threw at the end of Dr. Moreau parodied the rhetoric of novel and script: “You Must Come To Eat Plenty Flesh—That Is The Law/You Must Slurp Up Drink—That Is The Law/You Must Dance Wildly And Laugh Uncontrollably—That Is The Law.” And it suggested that his pleasure was shared. It was also reciprocated, judging from the crew’s inscription on the book Australia: The Beautiful Land that they gave him: “You Came To Our Country As A World Famous ‘Actor’ You Leave Our Shores As Marlon A ‘Mate’ Of Ours.”93
Despite disappointments like The Island of Dr. Moreau—some of them initiated or exacerbated by his own irritability or impatience—Brando continued to pursue roles and entertain options for promising projects with major writers and directors (e.g., David Lynch, Baz Luhrmann—he opted out of Lurhmann’s invitation to perform in his postmodernized Romeo and Juliet, confessing that he couldn’t “see my way clear to keeping the characters aright in the circumstances”).94 Though he said his principal motivation was money, the sheer variety of his activity belies this. In April 1997, he traveled to Mexico City to meet with the Nobel Prize–winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez about adapting his novel Autumn of the Patriarch for film. “When we met, I was very busy trying to convey my ideas in Spanish,” Brando writes to “Gabriel” that May, “as the tequila hit home I felt that I was drifting from the points I wanted to make. It was very disconcerting and rare to look into a pair of eyes that moved very little and saw very much.” This intriguing project, which involved Sean Penn, Miriam Colon, and Mike Medavoy, in addition to Brando, never materialized.95
Of the films he worked on during this decade, Free Money (1998) was the most derided and the one he most enjoyed making. A farcical blend of satire and slapstick, directed by the Canadian Yves Simoneau with a screenplay by Anthony Peck and Joseph Brutsman, the film was about Sven Sorenson, a corrupt prison warden called “the Swede” (Brando), in a Minnesota backwater, who freely executes rebellious prisoners. At home, he treats like inmates the unfortunate men—Bud (Charlie Sheen) and Larry (Thomas Haden Church)—coerced into marrying his spoiled twin daughters. Donald Sutherland was Rolf Rausenberger, a judge whose villainy supports Brando’s warden, and Mira Sorvino was Karen Polarski, the judge’s estranged daughter, who becomes an FBI agent and returns to her hometown to redress the wrongs of her father and the Swede. Despite the solid cast, and Brando’s own eagerness to make good on his part, the oddity and excess of the story failed to strike a chord with audiences. Here was another late project where a big paycheck and the pleasures of working with other talented actors were outweighed by the film’s harsh reception.
Yet, in Free Money Brando played his most unqualified villain ever, and the film is therefore revealing of his views on evil and his comic method. Brando’s participation in the film was unstinting: He contributed ideas for characterizations, scenes, and dialogue and drew liberally on his own experience. In the first scene, Brando’s Swede is awakened abruptly by his daughters, and he cautions them sternly about the dangers of startling him—a lifelong issue for Brando. It helped that he was familiar with the film’s setting from his years at military school in Faribault, Minnesota. Familiar, too, was the
mindset of this Bible-thumping enforcer who tattoos “Jesus Saves” on his skull and drapes an American flag over the made-to-order truck he cherishes as much as his daughters. The characterization of a warden known for killing escapees in cold blood would have made sense to Brando, who spent years reading about and protesting capital punishment and unjust sentences.96 “Think big, be big, like the Swede,” one hapless son-in-law (Bud) says to the other (Larry), advice that reinforces the town ethic: Power alone matters.
Free Money’s thematic insistence that imprisonment has little to do with being locked up is echoed by cinematography that exposes the dilapidation of this remote forest region, which keeps things gloomy despite the humor. Indeed, Brando was funniest on film when circumstances were grim. And the Swede’s prison is as bad as they come; predatory guards give free rein to the worst inmate elements. Here, too, Brando drew on experience; worries over Christian Brando serving time in California energized his critique of the movie’s barbaric penal code.97 The outside is no improvement; everyone lives in fear of the Swede and his cronies.
Whether it’s his way of dealing with recent events or simply distracting himself from them, Brando embraces the tradition of Laurel and Hardy and W. C. Fields: his sputtering animal sorrow while gazing on his stolen truck smashed by a railroad car; the deadpan twang as he snaps at a subordinate, “I want you to shut every hole in your body”; and the chuckling, “See you in church,” before preparing to grind up Bud and Larry in a garbage truck. The sons-in-law are saved by Sorvino the FBI agent, who is then assaulted by the Swede. Some viewers were appalled to see Brando, looking like Bozo the Clown with reddish tufts of hair, smash Sorvino on the head with her shoe heel, muttering, “This is hurtin’ you a lot more than it is me, and that’s the way it oughta be.” But his reaction when she, blood running down her face, shoots him is as genuine as Paul’s in Last Tango. Registering the shock of mortal gun wounds was a Brando specialty extending back to childhood, when he often impressed other kids with his dramatic finishes.98 Because this is farce, the Swede is back to normal in the next scene, an inmate now in the jail he formerly ruled, visited by the new warden (Martin Sheen).
According to scriptwriter Brutsman and director Yves Simoneau, Brando was responsible for the boldest acts of comedy in Free Money. He improvised the flag-draped blessing of the Swede’s new truck, the Bible-reading scene where he lays down the rules of the household to his “fornicating” sons-in-law; the dinner scene after his truck is stolen where he grouses darkly in Swedish-inflected English; and the notorious moment when he falls facedown into a toilet bowl. He was also responsible for the sterling cast: Donald Sutherland (again), Mira Sorvino, and Charlie Sheen all jumped at the chance to work with him.
Brutsman and Simoneau offer a window into Brando’s ideas about comedy, in noting how he liked to be “outside of the plot,” viewing anything scripted as dated, preferring spontaneity.99 Brando said in reference to Lily Tomlin that “all of her humor comes from anguish.” Then he added, thinking about other comedians he enjoyed—Don Rickles, Richard Pryor, Moms Mabley—that “most humor does.”100 Twenty years later, he seems to have known what that meant from deep within. Free Money was politely ignored by major critics and received mostly negative reviews, though it was profitable, as were all of Brando’s late films, whatever their drawbacks.
The Swede with FBI agent Polarski. Newscom.
After extravagant performances as Dr. Moreau and the Swede, Brando played a relatively sedate character in his last released film (on July 13, 2001), a businessman-gangster in a crime thriller set in Montreal. The Score (2001), starring Robert De Niro (Nick) and Ed Norton (Jack), was a three-generational star vehicle with endless plot twists. As usual, Brando made the genial desperation of his wheeler-dealer persona, Max, look like second nature. Brando’s goal, as he told David Page, his costumer, with whom he had extensive conversations about the character, was to play a gay man as the norm. Max is an aesthete who lives in a lavishly decorated mansion with an indoor pool and wears expensive suits, gold rings, and silk dressing gowns with cravats. His engineering of deals has supported his appetite for luxury and kept him a step ahead of the mob . . . until now.
Critics liked the film. Roger Ebert called it “a classic heist movie,” applauding Brando’s “dialed-down Sidney Greenstreet.” Peter Travers agreed that Brando, “his eyes alive with mischief, is the life of the movie.”101 Despite disgust with Muppets creator Frank Oz, another late director Brando thought incompetent, he enjoyed working with De Niro and Norton and managed to give his character depth. Max is a performer who makes an entrance everywhere he goes, cajoling but never showing his cards. The trouble is, he’s not that good: a wanna-be actor-manipulator. Thus, his vulnerabilities are also patent: He’s a gay man in a world of thugs, dependent on the skills of others.
He removes his mask only once, in a scene with Nick, his protégé, beside Max’s basement pool, its Roman imperial style reminding us that both actors played “the Godfather.” In a paisley blue silk robe, with a matching towel, a bottle of champagne, and a glass in his hand, Brando reveals Max’s pathos. He and Nick both know he is lying low from the mobsters posted on his doorstep who are ready to pounce if he doesn’t produce their money. Max has to plead with Nick to save his life by taking the kind of risk Nick has spent a career avoiding. Max leans in, grasping the pool railing, his voice a raspy whisper: “I’m gonna tell you something. For the first time in my life, I’m scared. I don’t know why it is, I was never scared before but I’m scared now, Nick . . . if I don’t get him his money . . . don’t don’t don’t. Don’t let me slide on this one.” His face is anguished, his eyes sad and blue; he is simply an old man in distress. Because Nick is humane, he responds to Max’s need.
Poolside in The Score. Newscom.
In the last scene, Max lies in bed watching the news, barely reacting when he learns that Nick has scored, and he is safe. Max doesn’t smile because he knows he’ll never really be safe. Brando’s final image on screen conveys hardness, the realistic acceptance of life’s burden.
Max was the last Brando character to appear on screen, but the last one he played was an animated character, Mrs. Sour, founder and head of the “Mrs. Sour Candy Company.” The Big Bug Man was never completed because the producers could not get financing, but Brando recorded his part. Mrs. Sour was Brando in full feminine regalia: ringlets, wide-set blue-gray eyes, a pair of sagging cheeks to match the sagging breasts, a river of wrinkles flowing from forehead to chest. Brando fashioned a soft falsetto voice and managed to convey wisdom and jadedness in Mrs. Sour’s signature stance: one skinny arm provocatively lifting an edge of her dress to reveal ruffled polka-dot panties, the other primping her curls. Sadness and exhaustion prevail in the belligerent, self-involved, still aggressively perceptive Brando eyes.
While supposedly a lark, advertisements promising “a story of how celebrity and success can corrupt even the most goodhearted among us” suggest a deeper meaning that might have appealed to Brando.102 This animated film, hand-drawn by Peter Shin, also starred Brendan Fraser as Howard Kind, a shy, diminutive candy-company employee who is bitten by bugs and transformed into a superhero, the “Big Bug Man.” Brando spent a day recording Mrs. Sour’s three appearances in the film, and he dressed accordingly. On June 10, 2004 (exactly twenty-one days before his death), he donned a blonde wig, dress, white gloves, and makeup to play the old lady “who sounds like the Godfather.”103 Despite the oxygen tank, which he depended on as death approached, Brando still managed to move the voice directors recording the performance with his acting. As one of them noted, somehow, remarkably, “He became her.”104 A corrupt, narcissistic old lady owner of a candy company—who could have predicted this as the Brando character to complete the final decade?105
Mrs. Sour. Character design by Peter Shin (original in color).
CHAPTER EIGHT
CITIZEN OF THE PLANET
From the beginning of his career to the end, Brando treated his cel
ebrity as a means to public ends. During his theater days, he was engaged in philanthropy, supplementing performances in Ben Hecht’s A Flag Is Born with cross-country touring where he gave speeches to raise money for a Jewish state. Brando’s altruistic uses of fame expressed ambivalence toward work he deemed popular entertainment and dreams of doing something more consequential. He sided instinctively with the vulnerable and the excluded, instincts that became habits at school, on Broadway, in Hollywood, and in his travels.
Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work Page 31