Marlon Brando's Delusional Greatness
Marlon Brando was a great man: a genius, a visionary, a generational talent, and perhaps the best actor to ever live. Few would disagree, claiming it self-evident. But the latest biopic on Brando’s turbulent life can’t seem to decide either way.
Waltzing with Brando was a years-long passion project for Billy Zane, a prolific actor in his own right, who both produced the film and starred as Brando. Yet rather than focus on Brando’s acting career, or even his litany of scandals and controversies, the film zeroes in on his fanatical pursuit to build a utopian resort on his remote private island in the South Pacific. Based on a memoir by Bernie Judge, the real-world architect-turned-confidante hired for the project, the story unfolds through his eyes, giving a personal view into the method of Brando’s madness.
As a sincere Brando (and Zane) admirer, I went in wanting to love the film; yet even wishful thinking couldn’t save it. Brando is bad.
Through unbearably cheesy smash-cut narration, endless fourth-wall breaks, and the type of hackneyed writing you’d imagine goes along with all of that, we’re shown a tension between the nebbish architect and Brando’s grandiose, even reckless, vision for the island. Inadvertently, however, the real tension lies somewhere else: can a man actually be great when he’s as deluded as Brando?
To be sure, the filmmakers seem to believe Brando had all the hallmarks of greatness. They build an atmosphere to showcase his magnetic energy, where “surrounded by strangers,” he still “felt completely at home.” Even the locals are drawn to him, despite having no idea who he is. With an air of noblesse oblige, he’s gracious to everyone around him, and Zane’s perfectly natural performance is the film’s only saving grace.
The development project itself has a Napoleonic flair to it; in spite of bankers and builders telling Brando it’s impossible to create modern convenience on the island, he pushes forward, putting his career and personal fortune on the line. He becomes singularly obsessed, disappearing from Hollywood and agreeing to star in “that gangster movie” only to finance the next stage of the resort. And in a true tell, he inspires others to his own vision. Bernie leaves his wife and kid behind in Los Angeles to embark on the years-long project; though his professional intuition says it’s futile, he can’t help becoming wrapped up in Brando’s mission to “change the world.”
Delusion is part and parcel of greatness. Brando’s insistence on powering the island with electric eels, for example, feels downright Trumpian. But the intent doesn’t quite match the scale of the vision. Delusion can be bold and enigmatic — or it can be completely banal.
From Brando, we get endless lectures that one might find in a DNC fundraising campaign. Narrative cuts highlight his involvement in the civil rights movement, which is tied as a moral equivalent to the environmentalism which inspires the resort. He wants to protect the local ecosystem and sacred tribal land, while building a more sustainable future — every platitude in the book. And of course we get a visit from Sacheen Littlefeather, the fake Native American who excoriated the Academy on Brando’s behalf after his Godfather win.
This is all framed as if to fit on a bumper sticker or a lawn sign - and we’re expected to believe Brando’s greatness comes from being a Very Good Person in the contemporary, ideological sense. The tension explodes as Bernie rage quits, calling him a “hypocrite” for making the necessary ideological compromises to see the project through; can greatness exist without moral purity? But the film fails to see that herd morality has no claim over individual striving. Rather than cast doubt on Brando’s exceptionalism, the alienation of lesser men who follow him all but proves it. Achilles had no need for the laws of kings, after all.
The project, which eventually was realized, was not exceptional because it was some deluded hippie’s fever dream to save the world. In fact, it’s the opposite: it’s great because it is the result of one man’s relentless pursuit to master the world around him in very tangible terms. Brando’s 60 year acting career is a function of this same tendency, the exceptional mastery of craft, art, and self required to succeed to the extent that he did. And while the real Brando was as ideologically bland as the film portrays, that moralizing was a blind spot within an otherwise consistent commitment to resist conformity and mediocrity.
The epic sagas of great men have been a fixture of the Western imagination all the way back to Homer. We still look for that kind of inspiration — even if cultural output today often fails to deliver — and we can very easily have it again. All we need to do is remember where to look.
Gage Klipper is a writer based in New York. Previously, he was the culture critic at the Daily Caller and an editor at Pirate Wires
