DEAR MR. BRODY (A-minus) - Documentaries have a way of rescuing obscure stories from the dustbin of history. This peppy production unspools the tale of Michael Brody, a highly unstable trust-fund hippie who in 1970 announced that he was going to start giving away his millions and invited the world to mail their pleas to him.
Writer-director Keith Maitland stumbled with his 2016 homage to the "Austin City Limits" TV show, "A Song for You," but he has a surer hand here unpeeling the fascinating tale of Brody's brief moment in the sun, when he was quickly revealed to have been too good to be true. Maitland, with the help of producer Melissa Robyn Glassman, unlocks a trove of the tens of thousands of letters stored in several locations, all but a few of them unopened for decades.
We are introduced to some of the people, 50 years later, who are invited to unseal their letters and read them aloud. The emotions are genuine and powerful. These people, a few of them children at the time they wrote in, managed to carve out meaningful lives, even without getting a penny from the heir of a margarine fortune. We meet a daughter and mother who had separately written in for a handout. There is a preacher who, as a young man, envisioned expanding his hair salon that would have served a diverse clientele. Most touching are three sisters who jointly discover the letter of their mother, who also had dreams of being an entrepreneur.
Michael Brody was a spoiled con man. Age 21 at the time, he had dreams of being a pop star, and at the height of the media scrum he appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show." He had a whirlwind romance with a cool hippie chick, Renee, who appears here, seemingly still befuddled by the phenomenon. (Their son appears, too; he inherited a stash of unopened missives.) We also hear from a former high school classmate of Brody's, now a filmmaker, who tried in vain to produce a fictionalized version of the story, as well as a concert promoter who got swept up into Brody's entourage and provides some inside perspective. Pay attention and you'll see young TV reporters, including Geraldo Rivera, Peter Jennings and future "60 Minutes" stalwart Ed Bradley, rocking quite the 'fro and perhaps inspiring the retro look of Questlove.
While Brody's personality dominates this narrative, in the end the story is about the thousands of desperate people whose hopes fell victim to a frivolous young man's greed for attention. These ordinary people reached out -- often on behalf of friends or family members -- but never got the courtesy of a response. They moved on, regardless. One scene involves footage from a feeding frenzy of hopefuls, where one man, after talking to others in line, realizes that his hardship pales in comparison to that of the others, and so he walks away.
Maitland uses visuals well to add poignancy to the presentation. We see closeups of hands, now old or middle-aged, gripping a letter, and we watch the reader get magically transported to their youth, to a head space they might have completely forgotten. We see close-ups of the printed words, super-close-ups of individual letters, even punctuation. The effect is touching. The three sisters recognize a little stylistic flourish of their mother's: she bound the pages of her letter not with a staple but with a safety pin.
The words of the title, "Dear Mr. Brody," echo throughout the film, and you can hear the ellipses that follow that phrase, a hollow space for the wishes and dreams of ordinary folks. The movie, in the end, isn't about a fatuous playboy living out a self-indulgent fantasy. It's about the rest of us who forged ahead, soberly through the decades. Charity be damned; whatever they ended up with, they earned it on their own.
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