I think Brando is more misunderstood than overpraised. Like you’re saying he wasn’t always naturalistic as if that’s the point of great acting. It’s really about being expressive and insightful, which is what he was in a lot of his performances. There’s the story about how Stanley in “A Streetcar Named Desire” was not meant to be this deep role, but it became that by the way Brando played it. Instead of just being the antagonist to Blanche, Brando’s Stanley was her foil. It added dimensions to the play that even Tennessee Williams said he hadn’t thought of. That’s something extremely rare for an actor to do.

I do think that his career in general was not what it could have been. He had too much success too quickly and because of that he became lazy and disinterested, especially later in his career. He gave up the theater (he would back out at the last minute of doing the Actor’s Studio production of “Three Sisters” and Kim Stanley wanted him to play Hamlet to her Ophelia but that never came to fruition) and far too often did movies that didn’t take advantage of his talent. I think that if he had struggled more early on that he would have been forced to find a acting career path that he would have found more engaging and satisfying and we would have gotten much greater work than what he did.

I will say that his role in “The Godfather” definitely is overpraised as even Brando didn’t think there was anything special about it.