Lenny and the Kids

Super interesting to see that this is how the Safdie Brothers really got their filmmaking careers started. While it does feature similar pacing and cinematography to their other 3 primary feature films, its mostly missing the utter anxiety and claustrophobia. Though things are going "wrong" throughout it, this film's greatest strength is in how touching it manages to be in its rawness. It simply feels immensely real.

Ronald Bronstein does a great job as the dad who can't keep up with his own life and isn't doing the best job of taking care of his sons. And the boys are adorable and totally believable - it never feels like they are acting. They just feel like real kids being kids.

This definitely qualifies as a "slice of life" movie, "a real New York slice" in this case, as not a lot of profound events really occur, but it has enough charm that it functions well as just that. It's really wild that the bros went from such an endearing first feature right into the junkie tale HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT as their follow-up, one of the bleakest movies made this century. What an insane dynamic to flex with your first two films - no wonder they started getting celebs on board fast for Good Time (one of my favorite films of this century) and then Uncut Gems! Rise Safdies, rise!

Only 1 year after Josh Safdie's directorial debut, came the first true collaboration between Josh and his brother Benny, and it sure is noticeable. Daddy Longlegs is a perfect combination of Josh Safdie's raw tone and passion for storytelling with Benny's creativity and comedy. While they could have used the bigger budget and crew to make a more stylised, traditional Hollywood film, the Safdies have instead opted to perfect the formula that was used in The Pleasure of Being Robbed. That film's raw perspective with a hindered believability is now a completely realized and believable world. The film is so convincingly documentary, in-fact, that it becomes almost impossible to even begin to imagine the process of writing it - absolutely everything feels improvised.

All of the acting is great, especially by the kids. The brothers had to go through a very unique directing predicament: dealing with child actors, yet they handle it masterfully. Under the direction of the Safdies, the kid's youth and inexperience somehow makes them all the more believable. It seems like in order to get good performances from all of the actors, almost every piece of dialogue had to be improvised, with only what happens in each scene being decided beforehand.

The result of all of this is a movie that makes the audience feel as though they are spying on a family, that they are watching a document of something private and personal, something not meant to be seen. The intermittent tension from the father's temper and recklessness is greatly aided by the raw, documentary approach. It doesn't feel overly dramatic or cliché, but instead gives off a much more relatable feeling that both parents and children can understand, and very much fits the unromanticized nostalgia of the story. Daddy Longlegs is a character study that feels not as though it were a study of a character, but as though it were an objective documentation of real peoples' lives, leaving it up to the viewer to make a study of what they see.

Daddy Longlegs (2009) Directors: The Safdie Brothers 7/10

From the brothers who will later bring us the phenomenal "Good Time", Low budget handhelds create many laughs and what the f*#$& moments, Bronstein's performance impresses by managing to be appallingly appealing, Irresponsible non-father trying his best with his 2 weeks a year 7 & 9 year old sons, Indeterminate ending to a whirlwind ride leaves one feeling the same way.

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The Safdie Brothers certainly served their apprenticeship. Their 2009 film "Daddy Longlegs" (aka "Go Get Some Rosemary"), is as independent and as close to 'cinema verite' as American cinema gets and its study of a deadbeat father's relationship with his sons is full of an improvisatorary feeling where the players don't so much act their parts as live them; we could be watching a documentary.

There's no plot, just a series of nicely observed slices of life filmed on the streets of the Safdie's native New York and showing all the promise of early Scorsese. Where it falls down is in its lack of any kind of substantial drama not, of course, that great drama happens very much in everyday life but after a certain length of time people-watching can become a tad dull. What sustains the film is the superbly naturalistic performance of Ronald Bronstein as the father, (he was also one of the film's co-writers). A newcomer, it's almost impossible to say where Bronstein ends and his character begins. He's wonderful in the part but he's also the kind of man I would cross the street to avoid, lacking as he does any sense of responsibility. The kids, too, are excellent, again not so much 'acting' as simply playing extentions of themselves. The film itself comes over as a cross between autobiography and homage and is a little too personal for mass consumption. It's sufficiently good that I wish I liked it more.

It's interesting and a little bittersweet to go back and watch Daddy Longlegs in a post-Safdie Brothers world. They've gone their separate ways as directors apparently, which is a shame, because each feature film they made was a little better than the last. And Daddy Longlegs was the first they directed together (there was another slightly earlier that just one of them did). There was also a documentary somewhere I believe. But the four core features - Daddy Longlegs to Heaven Knows What to Good Time and then Uncut Gems - that was quite the run. Uncut Gems was basically perfect, too, so I don't know if they could've ever topped that. Whether that was a factor in "breaking up or whether it was something else, I don't know.

Anyway, Daddy Longlegs is about a chaotic father looking after his kids and doing a bad job at it. Thats most of it. It's not great, but I'm also not crazy about these super raw, improv-ish character dramas. Even the ones by John Cassavetes don't do a ton for me. I think the main casting choice in Heaven Knows What makes that approach more interesting, and then Good Time and Uncut Gems are kind of on another level. It feels like there's more immediacy and more going on in those films, and it's sad they perfected a kind of cinematic anxiety and then dipped (though their solo films - which I hope will start coming out sooner rather than later - might end up scratching similar itches).

I think Daddy Longlegs is more than worthwhile for anyone considering completing the Safdie Bros filmography, but it's also not really my thing. It's listless and wandering by design, but I watch this kind of film sometimes and I'm like, "So what?"

I asked "so what?" to myself a little less during Daddy Longlegs than some other rambly films, so maybe it was doing something sort of right.