- Director
- Keith Maitland
- Rating
- n/a
- Running Time
- 97 minutes
- Release Date
- n/a
Overall Score
Rating Summary
This will be one of many reviews during this year’s SXSW Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Life may have been tough in the 1970s but is more or less the same for many people today though in different ways. Meanwhile, there have always been those willing to help any way they could. However, many may not have heard the story of Michael Brody, a 20 -something hippie millionaire who publicly offered to dish out millions of dollars of his inheritance in order to help anyone who asked as a way to change the world and usher peace. Suffice it to say that this created a firestorm. Unsurprisingly, there was a lot more to that story beyond more than a mere kind gesture that may or may not have been genuine. Dear Mr. Brody is a documentary that tells the dramatic and ultimately sad rise and fall story of Brody at the hands of drugs and various mental health issues and the circumstances of his humanitarian gesture over the course of a short period in the early 1970s.
While this story was indeed a tragic one, Dear Mr. Brody is a hopeful time capsule depicted through the thousands of request letters sent to Brody either through dramatizations or interviews with their writers or their surviving relatives. Things certainly got emotional as they helped demonstrate the general struggle of the world then though the more letters that are read, the more we are reminded how these problems are not that different from what is happening today. As it was impossible for Brody and his surrogates to read all the letters that were sent to him, some remained opened until they were recovered by the filmmakers and those researching Brody’s story. The reading of these letters were even more emotional especially while imagining the circumstances behind those.
In the end, Dear Mr. Brody is an unbelievable story though one worth telling.
still courtesy of Cinetic Media
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The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.
