Vague Visages’ Waltzing with Brando review contains minor spoilers. Bill Fishman’s 2024 movie (released theatrically in 2025) features Billy Zane, Jon Heder and Richard Dreyfuss. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

Marlon Brando was a cinematic maverick known for popularizing method acting in the United States. It was a new form of performance where raw emotion and personal experience replaced Classic Hollywood’s polished melodramatics. Brando’s technique is displayed in now legendary films like A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), The Wild One (1953) and On the Waterfront (1954). Despite all his achievements, the Omaha, Nebraska native was notorious for unpredictable behavior on set — not memorizing his lines, showing up in bizarre costumes, arriving late and outright refusing to film. Off-screen, Brando’s life was just as chaotic. He openly embraced bisexuality at a time when it was controversial, fathered 11 children (three adopted) by five different women and cemented his reputation as Hollywood’s ultimate “bad boy” by cycling through sexual partners (often while married). All of this would have provided rich fodder for a biopic, yet Bill Fishman’s Waltzing with Brando narrows in on a specific aspect of the subject’s life that is mere fluff.

Fishman presents a fairly straightforward Brando narrative that doesn’t go deep, keeping it as light and airy as the actor’s carefree life in his personal oasis. One of the many eccentric facts about the subject was that he lived on his own island. In 1966, Brando purchased the atoll of Tetiʻaroa — a private island in French Polynesia (where the subject partially filmed the 1962 movie Mutiny on the Bounty). Based on the memoir by noted architect Bernard (Bernie) Judge, Waltzing with Brando covers the actor’s dream of building a sustainable luxury resort on Tetiʻaroa. Bernie (Jon Heder) gets commissioned to design a hotel for Brando (Billy Zane) and quickly falls under the spell of the stunning location and the actor’s freewheeling lifestyle.

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Waltzing with Brando follows the subject as he dances the night away with locals in Tetiʻaroa bars and swims with lots of naked ladies in crystal-clear waters. Fishman suggests that the actor liked to keep to himself, lolling on the sparkling beach just outside his door. Brando frequently waltzes around the house naked, and the many women he surrounds himself with are nude as well. One of the few traditional plot points focuses on Bernie overcoming his shyness about going skinny-dipping. Most of Waltzing with Brando is about Heder’s character having to temper the movie star’s harebrained visions for building an environmentally-conscious hotel. Bernie must convince Brando that this massive undertaking will be costly and difficult, since the island lacks many of the resources needed to build. The architect can never quite tell if the actor is serious as he makes outrageous suggestions with wide-eyed looks, as if he’s had a stroke of genius. Brando proposes lighting the island with electric eels and creating a water supply from his own urine. The actor reluctantly decides to go back to work, starting with “some gangster picture” (we all know what this is) to fund the outlandish project. None of this, however, is enough to sustain a 104-minute movie, nor is Waltzing with Brando as humorous as it tries to be.

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Waltzing with Brando’s script continuously hits the same beats, hammering the audience with weird and wonderful details about the actor’s time in the gorgeous Tetiʻaroa. But there’s only so much repetition that one can endure. While there is some slight dramatic tension with Bernie’s wife Dana (Alaina Huffman), who fears that her husband is having an affair amid Brando’s wild escapades, this brief subplot feels shoehorned in by Fishman just so there’s something passing for conflict. Even though Waltzing with Brando is based on actual events in Bernie’s life, the film’s inertia will likely make viewers curious about the premise. There’s no narrative arc or sustained emotional thrust in Bernie’s journey, and Fishman’s slow-moving film doesn’t prioritize the titular subject’s screen time. Bernie’s relationship with Brando would have been better served as a small part of a larger biopic about the many other sides of the actor’s life. Waltzing with Brando suffers from a sluggish rhythm and lack of narrative drive because it focuses on the wrong character and the wrong aspect of the subject’s life. Yet, for any disappointments viewers may have with the threadbare plot, one can at least find enjoyment by marveling at the Tahitian landscapes.

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The absolute highlight of Waltzing with Brando is the performances. Heder’s permanent O-shaped mouth and glazed-over expression is perfect for Bernie, who is bewildered by Brando’s laissez-faire existence. For cinephiles, it’s already clear that Heder excels at playing awkward characters — Napoleon Dynamite (2004) launched the actor’s career — so he makes Bernie’s awkward nature feel endearing and authentic. Heder also looks very similar to the real-life Bernard Judge, which makes him ideal for the role. As Brando, Zane is absolutely uncanny, partly thanks to Hannah Schenck and the film’s makeup team. With the aid of their prosthetics, the elder lead actor completely embodies the subject’s commanding but graceful presence, raspy voice and squinty-eyed intensity. There is no trace of Zane at all — it’s as if Brando has been resurrected on screen; however, it’s unfortunate that the performance doesn’t belong to a better movie.

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Another positive aspect of Waltzing with Brando is that Fishman recreates, nearly shot for shot, Brando in some of his most famous 1970s performances: Last Tango in Paris (1972), Superman (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979) and of course, The Godfather (1972). The costumes, Garrett O’Brien’s cinematography and Zane’s tiny gestures all work together to create a virtually identical replication. But the novelty of these astonishing recreations quickly wears off.

Although Waltzing with Brando isn’t without its merits, Fishman’s film would have been more suitable as a documentary. The scattered bits about the actor’s environmentalism, advocacy for civil rights and friendship with Dr. Martin Luther King would have been better discussed in that more informative and detail-oriented format rather than forced to fit around a narrative centered on Bernie’s family life that doesn’t really go anywhere. And while, yes, Waltzing with Brando explores a singular facet of a celebrated Hollywood icon’s life, at the end of the day, watching the hedonism of an obscenely wealthy white man without much emotional depth or humor is pretty damn boring.

Waltzing with Brando released theatrically on September 19, 2025.

Caroline Madden (@crolinss) is the author of Springsteen as Soundtrack. She’s also a film critic who has written for Screen Queens, Reverse Shot, IndieWire and more. Caroline is the editor-in-chief of Video Librarian. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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