Review: Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox

There's a scene in the documentary Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox that seems to have come about by accident, and is quite hilarious. The subject of the film, renowned soap-maker and 60s counter-culture eccentric E.H. Bronner is rambling to the cameraman about his various crackpot theories on religion and how to save "spaceship Earth" and so on, and then the focus and camera angle shifts to Bronner's female companion (presumably his wife.) As she begins to talk to the camera, we see that Bronner is still talking in the background, with the same intensity and pitch, only we can't hear him. It makes him look quite insane, which of course, he was. Bronner's bizarre preachings about how to live by the "Moral ABCs" as he called them -- a series of grade-school level fortune-cookie aphorisms about how to live well and treat others nicely -- landed him in a mental institution in the 40s and he was subjected to brutal shock treatments that seem to have left him damaged for life.

Born in 1908, Bronner was a German Jew from a long line of soap-makers, and he immigrated to the States in 1929, fearing the rise of German anti-Semitism. He later learned that his parents, who had thought his fears of the Nazi party overblown, had been killed in the Holocaust. Once moved to the U.S., he set about combining his profession of soap-making with his impenetrable spiritual code, called the "All One God Faith," a amalgam of Jewish and Christian moral teachings combined with German enthusiasm (he loved to use exclamation marks) that he actually printed on the bottles of peppermint soap he sold. Here's a sample: "Absolute cleanliness is Godliness! Who else but God gave man Love that can spark mere dust to life! Poetry, uniting All-One! All brave! All life! Who else but God! Listen Children Eternal Father Eternally One!" These prescriptions for clean living, morally and physically, became popular with the hippie set during the 60s and as we're told in the film, it's the hippies who still form the customer backbone for Bronner's soap business.

Much of the main action of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox comes from archive footage of Bronner from the 60s and 70s, but an equal amount comes from contemporary footage of Bronner's various descendants, and that is probably the film's weak link. Bronner's eldest son is, while not insane like his father, certainly a weirdo who is filmed here as he approaches random strangers during his daily routine and tries to tell them about his father. I'm not faulting the man for holding his father in high esteem, but his whole personality is, how should I say ... not camera-friendly, and that comes across in spades. He seems to be play-acting for us, and we can feel the discomfort he creates in people he approaches. I mean, really -- would you want to be ensnared in a conversation about a soap pioneer? Bronner's grandchildren, who also help to carry on his soap business in the present day, are also featured but come across mostly as non-entities, with little to offer except a description of how they fill their daily lives -- making soap.

As long as the film stays firmly on Dr. Bronner, it's an intriguing portrait of how eccentricity/mental illness can co-exist with productivity. We're told often during the film of Bronner's single-minded determination to sell his wares no matter how much his erratic personal habits affected his bankbook. At one point, we learn that he was producing his soap single-handedly out of a flophouse in Los Angeles and then giving it away. Eventually he was able to start charging people for it again, and the business recovered. When we see the archival footage of Bronner speaking at events during the 60s, we're watching a man who we know instinctively would have been completely unable to change his lifestyle or his personal philosophy, no matter how hard things got. He probably didn't know any other way to life. In many ways, Bronner is simliar to Roky Erickson, the main subject of another documentary I recently reviewed, You're Gonna Miss Me. Like Bronner, Erickson gained recognition and followers for his work despite being hobbled, mentally.

Director Sara Lamm has certainly done her homework in the film, gaining access to government logs that show Bronner called the FBI incessantly to report any number of things, such as, for example, the fact that communist forces were keeping him from contacting his "uncle," Albert Einstein. Those phone logs that survive start by detailing many of Bronner's preoccupations -- he also thought communists were poisoning the U.S. water supply -- and then resort to "he called again ... same stuff." We also learn some intimate details about how his mental difficulties prevented him being a father, or at least the kind of father his children needed, when they needed it, and we get to visit the mental hospital that he was confined to. Overall, Lamm has crafted a fun, quick film that fans of counter-culture figures (or soap, for that matter) should get a kick out of. I would just like to have seen longer, less truncated takes of Bronner speaking at events in the early days, and less of the contemporary soap-making dynasty footage, which gets repetitive quickly.