The smell of failure, fear of defeat

Meet Marlon Brandoand Salesman,Two documentaries Directed by Albert and David Maysles at Science Center B, this weekend Fri. 8 p.m., Sat. and Sun at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. (Albert Maysles will be present to discuss the films at the Friday night screening only.)

Albert Maysles scoffs at the idea that he and his brother David are pessimists. "In fact," he claims, "we are naively, sublimely "optimistic."

He concedes that they might have a hard time convincing anyone that their world-view is particularly rosy work, Grey Gardens, a portrait of Edie and Edith Beale (Jackie Kennedy Onassis's aunt and cousin), who live in senile isolation in a rundown mansion on Long Island. That film aroused sharp criticism; some felt that the movie was an outrageous invasion of privacy, while others questioned its veracity. Was it possible, they wondered, that Edie Beale acted as strangely as she did because of the camera's presence?

Maysles emphatically answers no. A former psychiatry student, he believes that people don't really change that much when they're in front of the camera. "The human personality is indestructible," he says. "Critics have given the camera too much credit in my films, and not enough to the people in them."

Two of the Maysles brothers' earlier films, Meet Marlon Brando (1965) and Salesman (1969), are at the Science Center this weekend, and in the first one the credit very obviously goes to Brando. The Maysles followed him through a day of reluctantly agreed to TV interviews. Brando's career was not at its brightest at this point; it was one of the few times he was forced to go this route to promote his films. He is painfully conscious of the demeaning role he is in, and at times he seems ready to explode at the idiocy of it all, as when the interviewers praise Morituri, and then confess under his questioning that they actually hadn't seen the movie.

But through most of it, Brando remains cool, almost embarassed. He looks as if he might be a Republican businessman from a small mid-western city--a dark streak there of vicious potential belying his affable, almost naive manner.

With each of the interviewers, he is the perfect method actor. He tries to make a personal contact with each of them through objects--commenting on their faces, their fingernails, anything to make them relate to him personally. Instead, they barrage him with the same stupid questions and cliches. He takes the offensive against the sweet vacuous interviewer from Chicago--"Jeezus, I'm going to have to look you up when I go to Chicago!"

"We'll look forward to seeing you," she parries nervously.

"Who the hell is 'we'?" he asks, mock-incredulously.

The interview who fares best with Brando is a jocky good-humored man willing to roll with his punches. If Brando insists that they speak German, he does so, and if Brando labels a particular question "stupid," the interviewer laughingly concedes that it is and moves on to something else. It seems an interviewer has one of two choices in dealing with Brando; either ask the typical questions and be met with icy contempt, or allow the talk to play itself out on a pleasant but superficial level. The interview format simply cannot contain the full sensuousness of Brando's character.

This small, at best interesting, film is followed by Salesman, which begs to be taken much more seriously. The Maysles followed a group of four door-to-door bible salesman in their journey through New England and Florida. In the breadth of the settings, there is a suggestion of something grand, perhaps a statement about loneliness in America. When Paul Brennan, the protagonist, tells his companions that the bible business must be good in Alaska, one is reminded of the scene in Five Easy Pieces where a hitchhiker proclaims the virtues of cleanliness in Alaska to Jack Nicholson.

Albert Maysles freely admits that the film is intended to bear implications for America, but there's something slightly dishonest about the project. Door-to-door salesmen and their customers are among the most disenfranchised people in the country. (Perhaps the only sort of alienation that can match that of men who will take to the road to sell bibles and themselves is the alienation of people who will allow them into their living rooms and listen to their spiels, if only to hear a human voice.) In the Maysles' film, we see only Hunter S. Thompson's America--"a land of 200 million used-car salesmen--and that is a vision of the edge, not the core, of the American experience.

Despite this subtle thematic dishonesty, the portrait the Maysles present of Brennan is perhaps the most affecting ever done in documentary film. On the road in New England, he is depressed--sales are down and his increasing anxiety shows in every gesture, the fear that he may never sell another bible. The trip to Florida gives him a second life, as evidenced in his little dance of anticipation in the umpteenth motel room of the week. But Florida is more of the same--agonizingly long sales sessions with reluctant customers that resemble the attempts of a spurned lover to keep an affair going which is now dead.

Slowly, progresspvely, Brennan begins to come apart. Having completely lost his confidence in himself and in this confidence game, he becomes almost schizophrenic in his sales pitches, alternating between the most hollow mouthings of salesmen's cliches and bizarre confessions of inferiority to his brother who went to MIT. And as he deteriorates, the other salesmen take their distance from him; they smell the Fear and it makes them uneasy, knowing it may be waiting to claim them in the next city.

"Everytime we start making a film," Albert Maysles says, "we think it will be a celebration of life." It doesn't seem to work out that way, he admits. But he feels that if he hasn't made happy films, he has at least made truthful ones. And that, he says, is more important