Stream It Or Skip It?

By all accounts, Marlon Brando was an eccentric and unpredictable person, and Billy Zane humanizes him in Waltzing with Brando (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video). This BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie dramatizes – or should that be comedicizes? – how Brando commissioned architect Bernard Judge to design and build an environmentally sustainable home and resort on the Tahitian island of Tetiaroa. It was a saga nutty enough to inspire Judge to pen a memoir, Waltzing with Brando: Planning a Paradise in Tahiti, which serves as the basis of this uptempo comedy that finds Zane giving a memorable, often brilliant, performance within an otherwise dishearteningly slipshod, forgettable movie. Which is too bad, because if it had been a more noteworthy film, Zane coulda been a contender for an Oscar.

The Gist: It’s 1969. Bernie Judge (Jon Heder) talks directly into the camera which, well, no thanks. Please stop. Don’t do that. There’s no reason for it. Makes the movie feel like a travelogue and reminds us of Annie Hall and High Fidelity and Ferris Bueller and a bunch of other movies that are far better than this one. A rule of filmmaking: If you’re going to bust down the fourth wall, you better bring it. Anyway. Bernie is a Los Angeles-based architect sent to Tahiti to scout a location for a hotel. His boss gives him an address for a local contact on the island, and after a comical and painful ordeal Bernie arrives and finds servants and topless women milling about, and also Marlon F—ing Brando himself (Zane). He’s the contact. Brando. Of all the people in the world. And of all things, Brando and Bernie hit it off, probably because Bernie’s willing to follow suit with the superstar actor when he invites him for an ebullient swim with the rays and reef sharks, sans bathing suit. And we have hereby established Bernie as the straight man to Brando’s eccentric, impulsive prankster.

Brando insists that Bernie stay in his home so the average-joe architect can scope out the island during the day and party with one of the most famous people to ever walk the planet by night. Rough gig! When the hotel job goes tits up, Brando pulls Bernie aside and tells him his dream: Brando bought the nearby island of Tetiaroa, and wants Bernie to design a home for him, one that’s self-sufficient and environmentally sustainable, the latter term being a bit anachronistic for 1970, but we’ll let that slide, because there are other, far more pressing things wrong with this movie. Anyway, Bernie flies in his wife Dana (Alaina Huffman) and daughter Sabrina (Ava Zane), so he can get them to sign off on the notion of him being gone for months at a time while they’re back in L.A. It doesn’t take much persuasion, because it’s a dream gig in one of the most beautiful locations in the world, and when Marlon F—ing Brando is involved, well, his mere presence is persuasive enough.

By 1971, Bernie’s easing away from Brando’s more insane suggestions – powering the home with electric eels, using elephants instead of bulldozers – and actually getting the project off the ground. He secures financing, hires a crew, figures out how to get a bulldozer (not an elephant) on the island – he’s just solving problems left and right and up and down and diagonal and from any and every which way. Things don’t go smoothly because they never do, but at least the problems aren’t so problematic that they require anything more than mildly amusing solutions. Meanwhile, Brando has to jet off to Hollywood to star in movies he doesn’t want to make so he can finance the project, y’know, trifling and quickly forgotten pictures like The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris, nothing too important. The project gets bigger and more complicated and even more expensive and there’s some question as to whether it’ll ever be finished, but we never feel any of the tension because the movie’s too busy trying real hard to be goofy. Do we care? Not really, to be honest.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: My Week with Marilyn and Me and Orson Welles are better versions of the Normal-ass People Hang Out With Famous-ass People formula.

Performance Worth Watching: Zane is inspired in the Brando role, interpreting the loose-nut middle-aged actor’s persona as subtly insane, but also kind, generous, principled and complex – and this next part is key – without ever getting too heavy or compromising the character’s comedic tone. 

Memorable Dialogue: Giving a speech about the burdens of fame, Zane-as-Brando gets a sturdy laugh when he turns an insult into a compliment: “Bernie, you are completely unremarkable.”

Sex and Skin: Butts and boobs are rampant around these parts.

Our Take: Can we transplant Zane’s performance into a movie with a screenplay that has a point-of-view, something to say and doesn’t feel like several pages got caught in a breeze and were devoured by sea cucumbers? Waltzing with Brando aims to be like a parasailing excursion during a beautiful tropical afternoon, but it’s more like trying to drive a jalopy across a lagoon – it just sinks. Writer/director Bill Fishman’s (of Tapeheads and Suicidal Tendencies music-videos fame) attempt to create a whimsical comedy results in a stapled-together ramshackle mess that’s so often distracted from its main premise that it forgets to develop a substantial conflict. 

There’s barely a sliver of will-this-project-ever-be-finished tension (no one will ever compare it to Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse), and Bernie’s third-act marriage crisis is introduced and hand-waved away with such expediency, you wonder why they didn’t just feed that to the sea cucumbers, too. Same goes for supporting performances by Richard Dreyfuss and Tia Carrere, whose work is wholly expendable. The occasional feint toward making this thing a breezy hangout movie never amounts to anything, so the film ends up trapped in a limbo where it can’t be one thing and can’t be another thing and ends up being precariously close to nothing at all.

Some or most of this could be assuaged if the comedy was at all effective outside of Zane’s razor-sharp line-readings – he’s so good in such a lackluster movie, he sticks out like a gorilla at the ballet. The miscast Heder’s awkward charm doesn’t work to convince us that Bernie is competent enough to lead and complete this project; one wonders if Fishman’s direction for him never ventured beyond hey, act like a dork. There’s no narrative drive, no consistency of tone or pacing, no real insight into… well, anything, really. It’s flighty and whimsical in a manner that’s ultimately just klutzy and clunky, so I guess it’s not particularly flighty and whimsical after all. I guess it tries to be flighty and whimsical and fails, is what I’m getting at. And then it ends with what’s basically a commercial for the real-life environmentally sustainable vacation destination that stands on Tetiaroa today, and is part of the actor’s legacy of social consciousness. Unlike Waltzing with Brando, The Brando Resort doesn’t produce waste.

Our Call: This waltz is all left feet. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.