In 1970, a young man named Michael Brody Jr. offered anyone who wanted it a piece of a $25 million fortune.
50 years later, few actually remember what happened that whirlwind week. Brody doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry (though he does have a few Internet tributes).
But now he has a documentary to explore the strange story of the hippie millionaire who tried to fix the world.
Keith Maitland’s Dear Mr. Brody tells the story of Brody, heir to a margarine fortune. After a whirlwind courtship with the woman he ultimately married, the young hippie addressed the media, and the people, with a radical notion. He’d give money to anyone in need, and all they had to do was ask.
What Brody didn’t expect was the sheer, crushing volume of requests, not just from those who needed help, but also those who just wanted a piece of his $25 million.
Maitland rounds up some of the key players in the story, particularly Brody’s wife Renee and his bodyguard, plus a few writers, and producer Ed Pressman, who tried to make a movie of Brody’s life in the ’70s.
He also talks to a few of the people who wrote to Brody, thanks in part to the efforts of Pressman’s former assistant, who found crates of letters to the eccentric millionaire and made it her mission to read and account for all of them.
A number of those letters make it into the movie, through reenactments, or read by the original writers.
Brody’s story is amazing, but Maitland seems just as interested, perhaps more so, in the people who wrote to him, and what their need said about America in 1970 (and even now). It’s clear that he wants to understand where we were (and are) as a nation through the people who felt they had to reach out to Brody.
Unfortunately, the movie starts to fray apart under the dual focus. Despite first-person testimony from people around him and news footage of Brody, Maitland never really seems to get close enough to the young man. Part of that may be because there isn’t quite enough footage of him, evidenced by the reuse of a number of clips. The other reason becomes apparent by the end of the movie.
The result is a saggy middle portion that hints at two better documentaries that could have been made separately: one on Brody, and one on the people. The letters get repetitive, slamming the movie to a halt whenever it digresses from the progressively weirder Brody. And Brody’s story does get stranger as the stress of being sought out wears on him (as does his growing drug use). He starts to make claims of a bigger, billion-dollar fortune, and sets his sights on visiting the Nixon White House in order to confront the president and end the Vietnam War.
Meanwhile, Maitland doesn’t really stick with many of the letter writers for very long at a time, leaving viewers without any real closure to their stories. Those who read their own letters, we’re left to assume, ended up quite fine, but none of them really managed to interact with Brody outside of their letters reaching his inbox.
Fortunately, Brody’s story is fascinating enough to carry the movie along, but by the end, he remains a strange enigma. Dear Mr. Brody is worth watching to learn about the man, at least until someone starts his Wikipedia page.
* * * * *
Produced by Melissa Robyn Glassman, Megan Gilbride,
Keith Maitland, Sarah Wilson
Directed by Keith Maitland
Featuring Katherine Guerra, Geoff Marslett, Jessica Thompson, Sophie Tan,
Chrislyn Lawrence, Osei Essed, Rebecca Beegle, Frank Mosley, Josephine McAdam, Chris Doubek
