There may never be a Marlon Brando museum, but if there is one, expect director Bill Fishman’s light comedy hagiography Waltzing with Brando to be playing silently on a loop next to the ticket booth. Indeed, watching Waltzing with Brando without sound is the best way to enjoy a film that puts Brando on a wave-swept pedestal when it’s not toasting his effortless middle-aged cool. It will also spare everyone Fishman’s hacky dialogue, legend-burnishing historical tangents, lazy narration, and fourth wall-breaking explainer videos about the Ghyben–Herzberg lens. And, most importantly, it’ll save the world from a criminally miscast Jon Heder failing to properly enunciate his lines, even the important ones where the former Napoleon Dynamite digs deep into his soul and demands that “we have to find a way to share Earth’s precious bounty.”
Waltzing With Brando
2
/5
- Release Date
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September 19, 2025
- Runtime
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104 minutes
- Director
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Bill Fishman
- Writers
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Bill Fishman, Bernard Judge
Where the film works beautifully is in the one thing it was most likely to get laughably wrong: Billy Zane (Titanic) takes what would normally be a fool’s errand — giving full dramatic life to the often-parodied Marlon Brando — and delivers an uncanny and sensationally effective simulacrum of the eccentric two-time Oscar-winner. Working with prosthetics designer Jerry Constantine and make-up artist Mike Mekash, Zane disappears into Brando, nailing his relaxed, yet ego-inflated body language, sly, closed-mouth smile and lightly bronzed, early 1970s paunch. Zane is thoroughly riveting, which only makes it more disappointing that the movie surrounding him is so misjudged in almost every other department.
The Intoxicating Lure of Fame and Ego
Waltzing with Brando lands near the bottom of the stack of films about regular folks who enjoy an extended brush with a celebrity (think My Week with Marilyn, The End of the Tour and Notting Hill). At first glance, Fishman makes the intriguing choice, focusing not on Brando’s career but on his real-life attempt to build an environmentally unimpeachable resort on his remote Tahitian island. But Fishman seems uninterested in crafting a Fitzcarraldo-esque tale of how fame and ego can hypnotize anyone into following a celebrity’s quixotic dream. His real aim is to promote Brando the Environmental Superhero, an effort that becomes shockingly ham-handed in the film’s final moments as Fishman promotes Brando’s “cutting edge carbon-neutral eco-resort” and non-profit organization.
To create his dream resort, Brando enlists the Los Angeles-based architect Bernie Judge. He’s played by Heder, who conveys so little authenticity as an architect that we don’t believe Bernie could design anything that consists of more than ten Lego blocks. Initially, Bernie is dispatched to Tahiti by a rather emaciated Rob Corddry to find a suitable spot for his client to build a new resort. That client is, of course, Brando, and upon their first meeting on the island, it becomes obvious that not even the real Brando, at his Stanislavskian peak, could forge an on-screen bond with Heder. He’s not only too goofy a screen presence, he’s also saddled with some of Fishman’s poorest scripting choices.
A Story Filled with Screenwriting Crutches
It should come as no surprise that Fishman has only one other film writing credit (1988’s Tapeheads with John Cusack and Tim Robbins) and his lack of focus proves a major stumbling block here. At one point, Fishman pauses the story for an historical detour, complete with vintage photos, reminding us of Brando’s connection to “his friend Martin Luther King.” It’s the kind of puffery one expects from a film that needed approval from the late Brando’s estate, which this one did not. Later, the Omaha-born Brando lectures Bernie about his country’s treatment of Native Americans, leading to a recreation of Sacheen Littlefeather accepting Brando’s Oscar for The Godfather that’s so poorly done, you wonder why Fishman didn’t just write around it. Mixing awkwardly with all that glorification are numerous unfunny slapstick moments, including Bernie hanging upside down from a twin-engine plane. And his frequent fourth wall-breaking narration is a screenwriting crutch that has rarely felt so lazy. It’s a testament to Zane’s work that none of this devalues his performance; it only makes it stand out more.
With Hader breathing no life into his character, Bernie is relegated to a cypher whose primary purpose is to give Brando someone to play against. And the film does come alive when Zane is on-screen, allowing us to marvel at how he never wavers from playing the man, not the legend. He avoids making all the most obvious choices in playing such an outsized personality, leaning into Brando as a contradictory figure who despised Hollywood but was not above wielding the enormous gravitational pull of his aura to get his way. This works especially well on Bernie, who, after only a short time on the island, sheds his inhibitions — and occasionally his clothes — while his family mostly stays in L.A. And when Brando’s ambitions for his private island get loftier, Bernie goes along with it. First he’s roped into building a home on Brando’s private island. Then he agrees to design a full-blown eco-resort to pay for it, even though there is no potable water and no electricity. Not even Brando’s idea of using elephants will make it easier to transport heavy machinery to the remote construction site.
Classic Movie Recreations are Top Notch
The troubles with construction are mostly played for light comedy laughs that never come. Much of these troubles are financial, attracting the attention of Brando’s manager, played by an over-the-top Richard Dreyfuss. In order to help pay for his Tahitian dream, Brando agrees to star in The Godfather (the fact that Brando had a difficult reputation and was considered “box office poison” go conspicuously unexplored). Cinematographer Garrett O’Brien does a fine enough job mimicking DP Gordon Willis’ legendary lighting on the Francis Ford Coppola classic, and later he repeats the trick in recreating the look of Last Tango in Paris, Apocalypse Now and Superman. As good a job as O’Brien does, it all comes off as cosplay frippery that adds nothing to the story, except as a high-gloss reminder of Brando’s top career moments during that period.It’s disappointing that Waltzing with Brando’s ultimate goal is to mythologize, not humanize, the actor’s environmental activism, although it is miraculous that Zane manages to push out deeper notes of insecurity in what could have been just a trick performance. It turns out there’s a reason someone so famous, so brilliant, and so complicated has rarely been portrayed as a major character in a fictional film. Oddly enough, Waltzing with Brando gets the hard part right; Zane is fabulous. “The horror… the horror…” is everything else.Waltzing with Brando, from Iconic Events Releasing, will debut in theaters on September 19.
