The North Pole was briefly challenged by Michael J. Brody, a guitar-playing trust fund kid with a long hair, peace-loving and guitar-playing style, at the beginning of the 1970s. Brody, heir to a margarine fortune announced his news shortly after his 21st birthday.stbirthday that he’d give away most of his $25 million to anyone who asked — as a gift for the needy, a sign of rich-in-life contentment (he’d just gotten married) and a down payment on more love in a wartorn, unequal world.
The story that is often forgotten about the “hippie millionaire,” whose Scarsdale home, phone line, and Manhattan business address (all given out freely by Brody) were flooded with recipient hopefuls, is only part of the weird, wonderful and woeful retelling that is Keith Maitland’s engrossing documentary “Dear Mr. Brody.”
Maitland’s previous film “Tower,”The documentary, which heart-stoppingly described the University of Texas campus massacres of 1966, is one of the finest documentaries of recent decade. This one, as an imaginative slice of memory, history and contemporary application, is more than worth the wait.
Even if you’re unfamiliar with this blip in the timeline of eccentric beneficence, paying attention to the last 50 years would tell you that Brody’s pie-in-the-sky mission to change the world didn’t pan out. But Maitland’s film is about more than one big-dreaming guy giving away his cash, although his life was plenty eye-opening, and not without its own element of unaddressed deprivation. Brody’s wife Renee is one of the film’s interviewees, and the picture she paints of their whirlwind courtship — from being his hashish dealer to his jetted-to-Jamaica bride, and then straight into the maelstrom of the giveaway mania and everything that happened after — is vivid and heartbreaking.
Brody’s charity carousel and youthful energy were splashy enough to attract not only cash-hungry mobs but news crews, investigative reporters, and producer Ed Pressman (who initially envisioned Richard Dreyfuss heading his never-made film version). How “Dear Mr. Brody” counterbalances that story is to take us inside this wannabe Santa’s mailbags, to the boxes of pleading missives that remained unopened, sitting for decades in Pressman’s storage unit until the filmmakers got access to a trove of them through Pressman’s producing assistant Melissa. Both she and Pressman are interviewed.
Whether they’re read aloud, shown on camera, or narrated via recreated scenes (a technique Maitland also deployed in “Tower”These letters provide a rare snapshot of the lives of people living on the margins, fueled by hope of a better life. In their affecting details, they’re relevant to the desperation coursing through the struggling America of today, as is another contemporary phenomenon reflected in the inspiration to write them: billionaires trying to win our affection with flashy (and sometimes false) largesse.
People sent Brody hospital bills, photos and drawings, poems, songs, poems, handmade items, and any other material they believed would make him open his checkbook. But most curiously, these letters told and left behind stories — of inequality, fear, hopelessness, desire, and exposing recognizable worlds of sexism, racism and class — that would make anyone wonder what happened to the writers.
Maitland, a compassionate man, found as many people as possible to help him. We were able to meet a few of them (or their descendents). These are the most emotionally charged moments you will ever see.
Maitland also provides warmth and humanity to a handful letter-writers’ legacies. He then relays the story through archival footage and interviews Brody’s reaction when the sheer volume and scrutiny of his eyes became too much. It’s a story of loneliness, self-medication, jumbled sincerity, and harsh reality no less poignant for being a case of neediness from the wealthy end of the “Dear Mr. Brody” spectrum.
One thing seems clear, however — from the ways this documentary engagingly brings the past to light through a prism of interconnectedness to its exploration of problems behind coexistence and mutual aid that we continue to face, there’s still a helluva fictionalized movie to be made about the mysterious, innocent and troubled Mr. Moneybags who briefly ignited hope in a hurting world. So Tom Holland, go see “Dear Mr. Brody,”After you have taken in the information, call Ed Pressman.
“Dear Mr. Brody”In theaters in the US and online March 4.