Waltzing With Brando Review: On The Beachfront

Despite Billy Zane’s transformative turn, Waltzing With Brando can’t find much new to say about the legendary Hollywood firebrand.

There’s nothing wrong in getting some laughs out of this section of Brando’s life, but Bill Fishman’s film is too broad to undermine the late actor’s ego, letting one committed performance do all the deeper digging into his subject.

Waltzing With Brando is adapted from the memoirs of architect Bernard Judge. In the late 1960s, Judge’s California-based firm specialized in environmentally safe and integrated design. This work caught Brando’s eye, who needed someone to design his dream home and resort on a near-uninhabitable Tahitian island.

The efforts to design and construct this little slice of paradise are Waltzing With Brando’s main focus, but its tone is too light to offer any solid foundations to the story, meaning it’s doomed to fall in on itself before it even starts. Fishman’s adaptation of Judge’s memoir is too easygoing, offering only predictable plot beats and broad-stroke conflicts. The writer-director doubtlessly saw the potential for farce in Brando’s (ultimately failed) attempts to construct heaven on Earth. However, as a comedic enterprise, this was always likely to be beyond the abilities of the director of Car 54, Where Are You?, a one-time long-term resident of the IMDb’s Bottom 100 list. 

At the core of Waltzing With Brando are two actors seeking to emerge from the shadow of their biggest roles, though stepping into Brando’s even bigger shadow is an unusual way to go about it. Jon Heder has been hamstrung by his breakout performance in 2004’s Napoleon Dynamite. Despite his acclaimed comedic turn as the titular Napoleon, Heder has struggled to parlay that success into anything noteworthy since. He has attempted both comedic and dramatic parts, and the role of Judge should have offered him some meaty material with which to grapple. Unfortunately, Heder is miscast, playing Judge as too naïve and wide-eyed. This could be blamed in part on the script, but Heder doesn’t offer any sense of interiority or complexity to his character, and his irritating near-constant narration underlines this lack.

Playing Judge is too much for Heder, but playing Marlon Brando would be a challenge for anyone. Encapsulating an aura that emanates from the poster of The Godfather to this day is no mean feat. Like Heder, Billy Zane spied an opportunity with Waltzing With Brando. Despite spending much of the late 1980s and 1990s playing handsome charmers, Zane’s career is largely defined by his hammy villain in Titanic, and to a lesser extent by his cameo in Zoolander (“Listen to your friend Billy Zane. He’s a cool dude.”) All that gets left behind, as Zane gives the performance of his career as Brando. Aided by superb makeup and prosthetics, he dives deeper than mere impression, infusing the Hollywood legend with presence and enough personality to make his Brando more than our onscreen recollections of him.

When we do get recreations of Brando’s famous moments, from The Godfather to appearing on ‘The Dick Cavett Show’, we get hints of the complicated eccentricity behind the Hollywood mystique. These moments are the high points of Waltzing With Brando, and they balance out its attempts to wring humour out of his odd behaviour (For example, his experiments with electric eels as a power source are played for laughs rather than explored as a sign of unbridled ego).

Zane elevates every scene he’s in, which means the film falters whenever he’s not present. As Judge is the focus, we spend far more time with him and his travails (Unwieldy landscapes, family troubles, etc.) than we do with Brando. The film mis-sells itself somewhat, but that would be forgivable if Judge wasn’t written and played as a bumbling but well-meaning puppy. In scenes between Heder and Zane, one can’t escape the feeling their performances belong in two different films.

Even when the likes of Tia Carrere and Richard Dreyfuss show up to chew scenery and collect paychecks, they can only distract from Waltzing With Brando’s lack of insight for so long. By the end, the film remains unsure how to feel about the actor’s attempt at creating an ecological paradise. It’s far too slight to portray this endeavour as any great loss, but Zane is there to remind you what the film could have been.

Waltzing With Brando will be released in select US and Canadian theaters on September 19, 2025.