Hostage of His Own Genius

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That was in 1972. He had 32 more years to live, encased in fat and cynicism, enduring personal tragedies (notably the killing of his daughter's lover by one of his sons), emerging occasionally to grab some bucks for reading a few lines off cue cards. It was sad and to some of us infuriating. For if you were young and impressionable in the '50s, he was forever Our Guy — a man whose inarticulate yearnings, whose needs and rages somehow spoke for a silent generation, privately nursing our grievances at the bourgeois serenity of our elders. We would get mad at his fecklessness, but we never quite lost our faith in him, which was occasionally rewarded by the anarchic craziness of The Missouri Breaks, by the dainty befuddlements of another Mafia don in The Freshman.

Now that he's gone, that faith abides. No, he never did Hamlet or Lear or Uncle Vanya — those were someone else's dreams, not Brando's. He did, without quite knowing it, something grander than that. He gave generations of actors permission to make metaphors of themselves, letting their public find something of themselves in those private moments that, before Brando, no one dared bring forth. Maybe his greatest legacy is named Sean Penn. Or Johnny Depp. Or some nutsy kid whose name we don't yet know. But maybe not. In the end, most acting careers consist of no more than half a dozen great performances and an equal number of near-misses. Those he gave us. The work will abide — while the often foolish and more often misspent life that these performances mysteriously drew upon will fade away, lost at last in the hum and buzz of our infinitely distractible media age.