We don’t go to the movies anymore to be convinced. We go to admire acting as a kind of special effect.

Brando touched everything. Just in that scene, he touches the cat, his hair, his chin, his cheeks, the chair. He eats chicken with his fingers in Streetcar, picks up Eva Marie Saint’s glove in Waterfront, plays with puppies in Zapata and lamp shades in Last Tango in Paris. Throughout his career, he reached for women with the unthinking entitlement of a primate plucking fruit. “He actually really touched whatever he touched as if it were part of him,” wrote David Foster Wallace in a wonderful passage in Infinite Jest, one of the most perceptive things ever written about the actor. “The world he only seemed to manhandle was for him sentient, feeling.” Both a means of centering himself in the moment and a case of rampant scene-stealing, Brando’s fondlings were also a means of rendering communion with the universe, his playful Epicureanism often delivering a small shiver of mortality. Those puppies in Zapata are the last thing he touches before he is mowed down by federal agents. Don Corleone’s last act before the attempt on his life is to buy fruit from a vendor’s stall. (He “points so as not to disturb the vendor’s display,” notes Mizruchi, with pleasing delicacy.) It’s telling that during the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain named Zapataas his preferred Brando performance while Obama listed The Godfather among his favorite movies. The rebel and the patriarch: the picks signaled the extent to which that contest was fought out between conflicting notions of paternal authority—McCain’s maverick instincts honed in the shadow of his father, Obama’s more patient paternalism a simulacra constructed in the absence of his.

Brando’s career, too, spooled out between those two poles—an early burst of brilliance playing a series of majestically insolent rebels for Kazan, followed by a shadow-draped comeback for Coppola, as Corleone, the most famous patriarch in the history of movies. There is a great irony here, one that goes to the very heart of Brando and the secrets of screen performance. What happened in between—and after—those high points? Some critics have sensed an abyss of self-loathing, into which Brando fell, a figure of Wellesian tragicomedy fattened on burgers and fucking and unending disenchantment with the “lies” of the movie business. Not so fast, says Mizruchi. “The idea that Brando retreated immediately to Tahiti [after shooting The Godfather], where he drowned in the past and ate gluttonously, is unsupported by the facts,” she insists, with rather too much, perhaps, riding on that immediately. This is Brando viewed through an overly forgiving squint. Disdaining what she sees as previous critics’ “excessive emphasis on his romantic affairs,” Mizruchi relegates Brando’s experiments in free-form paternity to a series of parentheses and footnotes. Instead she gives us Brando with his nose buried in Camus and Baldwin—Brando the intellectual, thinker, and bibliophile whose book collection “outstripped those of most academics”; a “visionary” whose multicultural perspectives heralded our own.