Word: brandos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fraternal twin to Sky in the Bertolucci canon is Last Tango in Paris, his taboo-trashing melodrama about a displaced American (Marlon Brando) who provokes a torrid, cloistered affair with a young Frenchwoman. But the new movie is not about sex -- or even, Bertolucci says, "the impossibility of love. It is about the impossibility of being happy within love. Kit and Port don't realize that the modern couple is an endangered species. Couples are so attacked by the outside world that they create a kind of fusion, a symbiosis. And that takes them, eventually, to a crisis. They look...
...Revolution to The Conformist, from 1900 to The Last Emperor, are big canvases holding tiny, forlorn souls. Because of the performers' power, the Moresbys come alive onscreen as they never quite did in the book. Bertolucci looks at Malkovich, the lizardly eminence of Dangerous Liaisons, and thinks of Brando: "They are two monoliths, unchanging, absolutely still -- and, from the first moment, condemned." Winger, for too many years the great unused actress of American film, is the perfect vessel for a woman who must be a piece of baggage on Port's existential tour, then a Florence of Arabia ministering...
...issue, tinged with prejudice and artifice, is as old as theater. In Shakespeare's day, Othello was acted by whites -- and Olivier played the Moor - in blackface in the 1960s. In old Hollywood, where nonwhites were nonstars, Caucasians often played Oriental roles. Marlon Brando kowtowed through The Teahouse of the August Moon; John Wayne did a Genghis Khan job on The Conqueror; no Chinese ever played Charlie Chan. As recently as 1984, Linda Hunt won an Oscar playing a half-Chinese man in The Year of Living Dangerously...
...Brando is, well, Brando. The point of departure for The Freshman is a newspaper article Bergman came across, describing the arrest of a under-world figure for illegally smuggling endangered animals into the United States. Brando is flawless in his portrayal of the omniscient honor-bound mafia figure, just offbeat enough to make very believable the idea of a man involved in importing endangered species. Unfortunately, this ridiculous plot should not be the heart of the film. Like all of Bergman's scripts, The Freshman is about a man trapped in circumstances beyond his control, a role filled here...
Fortunately, The Freshman possesses another subtext that thrives on the power of Brando's acting. On one level, The Freshman is about the father-son relationship between Sabatini, who never had a son, and Kellogg, whose father died when he was six. This would be an utterly ordinary thesis in most films, but the force of Brando's potrayal of the paternalistic Sabatini and Broderick's capable rendering of the All-American rural innocent provide The Freshman with convincing human impact. Just as The Godfather succeeds largely because it was able to make the family life of the murdering, lawbreaking...