WALTZING WITH BRANDO - Mark Reviews Movies

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 18, 2025

The Marlon Brando of Waltzing with Brando isn't much of an enigma, which is fine, of course. Here's one of the most famous, accomplished, and celebrated actors of his time at arguably the peak of his career. It's a career he'd rather put aside, though, because the pressures of celebrity and the business of making movies have become irritations to him.

The real Brando, of course, would become reclusive and apparently disinterested in acting, even when he was in front of the camera, around and definitely after the period covered in writer/director Bill Fishman's movie. In it, Marlon is played by Billy Zane, who definitely had a look quite similar to Brando's during either actor's heyday and does a decent impression of the man throughout the movie.

Indeed, Fishman and Zane are so convinced of the star's ability to replicate Brando's appearance and voice that there are shots of some the actor's more iconic roles and scenes re-created here. Narratively, there's very little reason for this, but as a showcase for Zane's ability to copy such a well-known figure, there's every reason for it.

What this review has avoided so far, though, is that this is not movie that's directly about Brando, which makes all of that effort to replace the actor with his dramatized counterpart feel even more unnecessary. The movie's Marlon exists mostly in service of telling the story of the man who would help the actor become the secluded, almost mythical figure he would become in his final decades. At this point, the man had dedicated himself to getting some privacy finally in his life and, with his great success as a movie star, has earned enough money to buy an uninhabited atoll near Tahiti.

Brando's story during this period must have been intriguing. The story of Bernard Judge (Jon Heder), a straitlaced architect who meets and becomes friends with the actor while trying to build a hotel on Tahiti, is much less so. The fact that Judge's tale depends on Brando's existence for it to even make some kind of impression is the first sign of that.

The rest is that, for as much as Bernard does and sees in this movie, the guy frames the entirety of his own story within the context of his famous pal. Bernard learns a lot about Marlon, from his activism for civil rights, to his belief that Native Americans have received terrible treatment in both real life and on screen, and to the actor's environmental awareness. When a story keeps telling us that a side player in it is so very interesting, it's impossible not to keep wondering why the story isn't about that person in the first place.

When we meet Bernard (after an introductory scene that is all about the apparent puzzle of Marlon), he's just a boring and by-the-books architect living and working in Los Angeles with his wife Dana (Alaina Huffman) and their daughter Sabrina (Ava Zane). The head of the firm where he works offers Bernard a major project—a grand resort hotel to be built on Tahiti. Jack (Rob Corddry), the man financing the endeavor, is skeptical of the young architect's qualifications, but at least he's too dull to become caught up in the tropical allure of the place.

Anyway, Bernard becomes quite caught up in the pull of both Tahiti and Marlon, whose private island chain initially seems like a perfect place to build a hotel—until the guy gets first-hand experience of how difficult it is to reach and live on the atoll.

Marlon offers to help Bernard get the lay of the Tahiti and connect with people who could help the project move forward, and eventually, they talk about other things, share drinks and go skinny-dipping with the actor's island acquaintances a few times. A lot of the movie consists of anecdotes that—when it comes to Bernard trying to play a prank on the mischievous Marlon, for example—don't always say, do, or mean much, beyond Bernard trying to make himself seem more interesting by way of association. He repeatedly breaks the fourth wall to speak directly to the audience, as if that will help, too.

Most of the story, though, revolves around Marlon in another way. It's his plan to build a house and, later, resort on his private atoll, so that he can leave Hollywood, both as a location and in terms of his career, for good. The logistics of building on such a remote and inhospitable location, filled with unique plants and animals that need to be conserved, are somewhat intriguing, of course, but much of this comes down to Marlon's part in the project. He even has to reduce himself to making some, as he sees it, "gangster movie" to finance construction.

All of which brings us back to the starting point: If Marlon is the most important and fascinating character in this story, why isn't Waltzing with Brando simply about him? It's a question the movie struggles with and never finds an answer to, all the way to a coda that doesn't even seem to find the movie's protagonist nearly as worthwhile as its more famous subject on the side.

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