Mark Reviews Movies: DEAR MR. BRODY

Dear Mr. Brody, Greenwich Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 3, 2022

The story of Michael Brody Jr.'s fame was a short one. It only took about ten days for Brody, the heir to a margarine empire, to go from wanting to give away his entire fortune to changing his mind about the money, his place in the spotlight, and, apparently, humanity in general. That's one part of the story of director Keith Maitland's documentary Dear Mr. Brody, which treats the eponymous subject's life and intentions as a mystery and, hence, undermines the real lessons we might have taken from this tale.

At first, Brody's goal is presented as people saw it and wanted it to be. He had $25 million, and in 1970, the recently married Brody decided to give away that money to ordinary people who needed it. All they had to do was write him a letter with a request for cash.

This impulsive philanthropy probably seemed too good to be true to a majority of people, but that didn't stop thousands upon thousands from writing to Brody and his wife Renee, whom he married within a couple weeks of meeting her and who provides one of the driving interviews for the movie. The other primary interview subject is Melissa Robyn Glassman, a movie producer who was researching a project and discovered boxes of letters to Brody in storage. Not a single one of the envelopes was opened.

The mystery of what happened here isn't too difficult to determine. The more important one is how and why Brody came up with his plan, didn't put much thought or effort into it, and abandoned it with tens of thousands of people holding on to the hope of catching a lucky break.

All of that information is gradually doled out by the wife, Brody's bodyguard at the time, the stories of a couple journalists who followed the heir around, and a pair of filmmakers who separately had planned to make a movie about the man. The way that Maitland edits around and omits at least one key piece of information comes across as a bit manipulative and dishonest, especially since the truth of Brody's story is far darker and more dismal than the portrait of the eccentric millionaire the movie presents for so long.

That side of the bigger tale here is also at odds with a much more intriguing one. As Glassman starts tracking down people or relatives of those who wrote letters to Brody, we hear their stories, see where they are now, and come to understand how much Brody's promise meant to them then and could have affected the course of their lives. These ordinary people, re-living their old dreams and struggles, are far more fascinating than the unfortunate and tragic whims of the millionaire, and in treating them as secondary, Dear Mr. Brody misses a substantial opportunity.

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