‘Daddy Longlegs’: The Safdie brothers’ emotionally dense parental drama
It remains to be seen if they’ll be better off alone in the long run, having announced their creative split, but regardless of whether they stay apart or get back together, the Safdie brothers have made an indelible mark on independent cinema after establishing themselves as two of the brightest new talents on the block.
From 2008’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed to 2019’s Uncut Gems, the sibling filmmakers continued gaining attention through their raw, unvarnished, and unfiltered explorations of the human condition, whether it was through the means of kleptomania, drug addiction, petty crime, or opals that may or may not have magical properties.
For their second feature – and first to credit Benny as a director and writer alongside Josh – Daddy Longlegs took a more semi-autobiographical turn, with the brothers drawing on their own memories of their father in the years after he divorced their mother, leaving Ronald Bronstein’s Lenny torn between the responsibilities of adulthood, and his desire to continue acting like a child.
The single father and projectionist only gets custody of his boys Sage and Frey for two weeks out of the year, during which time he encourages them to adopt a carefree and light-hearted attitude to life while failing to display much in the way of personal growth as he behaves arrogantly and obnoxiously, starting arguments with pretty much everyone his own age while indulging his inner kid.
On the surface, Daddy Longlegs is the story of a bad father, because there’s no way of sugar-coating it. Lenny is immature, irresponsible, and puts his children through some truly awful things in the name of self-preservation above all else, but the Safdies never treat the film as a character assassination.
It’s undoubtedly derived at least in part from experiences they lived through, and while any ‘Father of the Year’ mug he may or may not have had would be most unearned, the Safdies immediately complicate matters by presenting Lenny as a person woefully ill-equipped for the day-to-day realities of fatherhood, but also a force for good who instilled ideas and hands-on educations on his kids that they carried with them for the rest of their days.
Doing the opposite of what any father would do isn’t an ideal way to live a life, but the Safdies, through Daddy Longlegs, constantly find themselves drawn to the idiosyncrasies and staggering bull-headedness of a man who’d happily drug his own children so he didn’t have to deal with them, and yet injects their world with a sense of rose-tinted whimsy that goes on to form the people they’d grow up to be, all while refusing to point fingers and blame Lenny as the architect of his own self-created malaise.
It’s an incredibly difficult balancing act to pull off, and even though Lenny has many irredeemable features and the evidence provided on-screen illustrates that there’s no world in which he should be allowed to look after his own kids unsupervised, Daddy Longlegs makes sure he’s always at least a semi-sympathetic figure.
By the time the credits roll, Lenny has learned absolutely nothing and remains doomed to repeat the cycle of impulsive chaos that draws everyone around him into its orbit. And yet, for the Safdies and their on-screen facsimiles Sage and Frey, their father taught them everything they needed to know.
