‘Dear Mr. Brody’ Film Review: Engrossing Doc Unearths Bizarre Tale of a Hippie Millionaire

thewrap.com:

st birthday 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 largely forgotten story of 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,” which heart-stoppingly recounted the University of Texas campus killings in 1966, remains one of the best documentaries of the past decade, and as another imaginative slice of history, memory, and contemporary applicability, this one is a more than worthy follow-up.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.