Daddy Longlegs: Presto Magic!

Essays—

Aug 16, 2022

Daddy Longlegs (2009) is the triumphant culmination of the Safdie brothers’ early period. By the time the two young prodigies (twenty-four and twenty-two years old) joined forces to make a movie about their childhood memories of their father, Josh and Benny had directed several short films under the aegis of their filmmaking collective, Red Bucket Films. Josh had also completed a seventy-minute feature, The Pleasure of Being Robbed (2008). Benny was drawn to slapstick and tangible reality, while Josh was more romantic and given to flights of fancy. Taken together, the Safdie touch is a fragmentary art of wonder: a tireless enthusiasm for the wonders of the world, which the filmmakers respond to with constant inventiveness. Imagination and realism go hand in hand, just as the two brothers move through life, guided by their skill at catalyzing the magic of the moment (“Presto magic!” to quote Lenny Sokol, the father in Daddy Longlegs, speaking like a conjurer). With their first feature as a duo, the brothers continued the lo-fi methods they had developed in their shorts, shooting clandestinely with a group of friends, moving the camera as frantically as their characters moved, and interspersing majestic anti-folk tunes to make us laugh and cry. The opening credits even feel like those of a short film, coming in, incidentally, on the laughter of a guy who has just taken a spill with his foot-long hot dog. This modest, cartoonlike beginning does nothing to prepare us for the simultaneously riotous and terrifying epic we are about to witness.

For Daddy Longlegs was also a step forward for the Safdie brothers—and a big one. Here, they are no longer exclusively in the realm of observation but also that of memory. However, their objective is not to dig up old memories but to share the powerful feeling of otherness they experienced as children through their relationship with an unpredictable father. By casting Ronald Bronstein as the father, the brothers opened up their film to alterity: the director of the influential Frownland (2007), a claustrophobic account of a few challenging days in the life of a tortured door-to-door salesman, is more familiar with the land of anger than that of wonder. Working with Bronstein, also credited as a contributor to the screenplay, helped inspire the Safdies to create a work of dialectic tension. With Daddy Longlegs, the two brothers embraced duality, putting in front of the camera two fathers (their own and the one played by Bronstein) and two young actors who are also brothers (played by Frey and Sage Ranaldo, the sons of multimedia artist Leah Singer and musician Lee Ranaldo, who both also appear in the film). The end title card pays tribute to “the middle perspective,” referring to the dialectic between the father’s point of view and that of the children, and between the children in the film and the children the Safdies once were. This strange tension reaches beyond the potential contradiction between celebration and criticism.

Bronstein would later step out of the fiction to join the brothers in writing and editing their subsequent films. The electro-nightmarish period of Heaven Knows What (2014), Good Time (2017), and Uncut Gems (2019) allowed the Safdie brothers to brilliantly expand their cinematic world, but it would be a mistake to reinterpret Daddy Longlegs in light of those movies. While they continue to feature poetic combinations (the stone traveling inside a fish in Uncut Gems is an equivalent of the salamander hidden in the Lucky Charms in Daddy Longlegs), these later works plunge into the dark and tragicomic empire of obsession: addiction in Heaven Knows What, muleheaded determination in Good Time, the neurosis of double or nothing in Uncut Gems. Instead, Daddy Longlegs takes place in a gap—the gap between childhood and adulthood, past and present, funniness and tragedy, realism and wonder. This ambiguous interval allows the Safdie brothers to open up a space for dreams.

Upon its release, Daddy Longlegs was most often described as the story of a bad father: Lenny, an immature thirtysomething who can’t take care of his kids, despite the fact that he has custody of them only two weeks a year. Yet such moralistic readings are the first thing the film strives to complicate. Yes, there’s nothing to eat in the fridge, and Lenny is egocentric, constantly playing around and making totally impulsive, bad decisions, including risking his children’s lives by giving them sleeping pills. But he also offers a different kind of education—albeit one that occurs in fits and starts, given how quickly he loses his patience with his kids (with a single sweep of the sheets, he makes them disappear and is off to the movies). Not only are his children constantly learning from him, whether he realizes it or not, but he also displays an astonishing pedagogic bent: Like any father, he reveals the tricks of his trade (he’s a projectionist), explaining that the white circles in a film signal the end of a reel. At the natural history museum, he has them focus on details of the dioramas in order to reorient their perspective. He sends them to the supermarket to pick up some herbs, yielding the film’s initial title, Go Get Some Rosemary. The rosemary is more than a detail; it’s the spice of life. The children learn that life is worth living only through play, and that beauty lies in the magic of details. Lenny is his own kind of educator. The kids may end up being raised differently from others, but at least they’ll know the secret of signs. And the Safdies will become the Safdies! Which explains why the film, far from being a warning, exudes gratitude for the father character.

As the Safdie brothers see it, Lenny has another virtue, which is that he always does exactly what he’s not supposed to do. The Safdies are irresistibly drawn to such exasperating recalcitrants. We tell ourselves, “No, he wouldn’t dare!” and then, yes, he does dare. Like shiny-eyed Howard Ratner at the end of Uncut Gems, gambling everything he has at the risk of his life—which indeed he will lose, but with a smile. How far can you go with the freedom of doing whatever you want? Lenny has his bratty side, but with the dignity of a handsome, haughty face carved in stone. In his most brazen moments, he refuses even the slightest concession. The terrifying scene when we learn the children are in a semicoma after Lenny gave them sleeping pills ends with his insolent reply to a doctor who repeats that he could call the cops on him: “You know what, you said that twice now.” A biting detail, and masterful writing. Just as we’re processing the film’s dramatic shift, Lenny’s audacity is stunning. He nearly killed his kids! And after drugging them so they wouldn’t wake up while he was out, Lenny takes off again, leaving them to potentially wake up on their own!

Only an exclamation point can properly convey our reaction to the nerve (and denial) of this guy doing what he shouldn’t do. Here the film elicits startled laughter, astonished laughter born of the collision of terror and comedy, logic and illogic. Laughter on the edge of the abyss, opening up an unknown territory where anything could happen. We have no idea what the next move is, but we know things are on the move. Everything is an excuse for dialectics; nothing must come to a stop. Stopping is death, as shown in Good Time and Uncut Gems, while life is the constant rekindling of contradiction: always unfold, refute, go against, because there is no categorically identifiable identity, there is no defined state. Lenny is never predictable; he is never true to form. He is, like each of us, spinning like a disco ball.

But is he really an exception, after all? When he gets the kids’ attention by claiming to fish with his bare hands on an improvised weekend getaway, he is upstaged by the eccentric show put on by a singer on water skis. In the next scene, it’s a bizarre teacher with a black eye, doing a math problem on his shirt. It’s as if the father’s oddness is contaminating the rest of the population—or else he is just one case among thousands. In Daddy Longlegs, the streets of New York City are full of these weird people roaming, begging, threatening, chitchatting, and spraying graffiti. All these supporting characters have their own lives and are introduced to us before Lenny encounters them, including his girlfriend, Leni (Eléonore Hendricks), who initially appears alone. You could easily veer off and follow the two Vietnam vets, or the dealer in empty CD cases played by Abel Ferrara.

This street cinema lays claim to the legacy of John Cassavetes (Shadows, as well as A Woman Under the Influence, with its so-called bad mother) and In the Street (Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb, and James Agee; 1948), the seminal short film screened by Lenny, whose title card encapsulates Daddy Longlegs’ moral: “There, unaware and unnoticed, every human being is a poet, a masker, a warrior, a dancer: and in his innocent artistry he projects, against the turmoil of the street, an image of human existence.” Every human, anyone at all. Lenny is a poet, a masker, a warrior, a dancer. A tightrope walker, a magician, a showman. He walks on his hands and beauty rains down everywhere, like the coins rain out of his pockets. Daddy Longlegs is dedicated to all these acrobats of life, not only Lenny—a sad-faced knight, a Don Quixote tortured by relentless frustration—but also the kids running behind him on their little legs, grabbing his shoulder or hanging on to his belt. And then there’s Leni, who enters the film whistling like a bird and enchants us with her magnificent husky voice.

The camera is on the lookout for moments of beauty, or rather it picks them in an infinite harvest, like the two fingers plucking a grape on the poster for The Pleasure of Being Robbed. The innocence in the Safdies’ gaze is that sense of wonder before a gesture, a situation, or an eccentricity. An innocence that is never naive, in that it does not shrink from extreme experiences. Like Jonas Mekas, the brothers are looking for “glimpses of beauty,” but their touchstone is that beauty should make us laugh. Their goal is bewildered laughter at the world’s strange spectacles. They have an unquenchable thirst for anything curious.

The film is working toward something very unusual, but what is it? The Safdies’ project is itself a strange one: a real journey back in time, with the two brothers running through the streets on the heels of an actor playing their father. For them, the shoot was a kind of exorcism. Just as Heaven Knows What was an exorcism offered up entirely to Arielle Holmes, whose life story inspired the film. For everything to happen again as it did then, the camera needed to be hidden where passersby wouldn’t notice it. The two brothers have reported simultaneously laughing and crying at what they captured while they were staked out, filming from the other side of the street. This movie is not a reconstruction but a deliverance; the past is returned to them. While the brothers have often told interviewers that their father constantly filmed them when they were children, it is revealing that we never see Lenny filming the kids here (unlike the scene in The Pleasure of Being Robbed in which a father directs his son on a slide). If their father filmed them when they were kids, who films the father? They do, now.

But there is also a kind of time travel inside the story itself. The unprepared father’s two annual weeks of childcare are like a time capsule; as Leni notes, Lenny’s hair turns gray over the course of a few days, as time accelerates. Some paranoid dream logic creates a parallel between the fistful of hair Lenny’s son pulls off a playmate’s head at the beginning of the film and the black hair his worries cost him.

For the film to take its final, poetic form, it must itself become magic. In its later passages, Daddy Longlegs no longer finds poetry exclusively by gleaning from the real but by transmuting its very form, through montage disruptions, narrative incongruity, the development of metaphors, the insertion of special effects, and the relinquishing of any screenwriting dogma (in the end, the father has not followed a moral arc; he has learned nothing and keeps going in circles, a slave to his impulses). Thus, out of the blue, the film shifts from the natural to the supernatural, through an extraordinary progression that must be followed step by step. The father drugs the kids because he doesn’t have a babysitter. Once the children are asleep, the film enters the realm of dreams. There they are, unmoving, two little boys floating above the city and time. These two Little Nemos in a semicoma drift from their father’s Frownland to Winsor McCay’s Slumberland. The narrative makes the most of such a terrible and poetic idea. When the boys wake up, their father takes them to another dreamlike place, the American Museum of Natural History, where they are terrified by a giant mosquito, and where a proliferation of animal metaphors appears to describe this father so unlike other fathers (they compare him to a monkey, then a snail, which he’ll literally become by carrying his home on his back). Yet through some kind of transfer, Lenny is the one to have a terrifying nightmare about a giant mosquito after visiting the museum. A multilayered nightmare, in which the narrative goes haywire: a man dangles from Lenny’s building, the sleeping children are replaced by hollow masks, Lenny crushes the mosquito. The insect brings to mind the fantasy element in Josh Safdie’s films (the polar bear in The Pleasure of Being Robbed) and echoes McCay’s animated film How a Mosquito Operates (1912). If the father dreams of the mosquito, it is not only because it has spindly legs like he does but also because the mosquito sucks blood the way his vampire children suck up his time (you could rewrite the whole film from that angle: how Lenny loses Leni while he has the kids).

The film’s emergent dream logic leads to the extraordinary ellipsis of the move. Lenny goes to get the boys at school, without their mother’s permission. He has nothing to eat (again), so he sends them to the supermarket (he’s pushing it). When they return—surprise—he has packed up his furniture as if by magic and tells them he is moving, right away, this second, without a moment to spare. It’s an incredible narrative coup de force, because the film is so realistic that we barely notice its sudden shift into total artifice. The wonder of life is doubled by another, more strictly supernatural kind of wonder. Lenny isn’t new to imposing countdowns (movie theater to school in twenty minutes, the length of a reel), but this time it’s impossible, unless you imagine that entire days have gone by, like when the kids spent entire days sleeping. This magnificent poetic license expresses a permanent state of instability. We have plunged into the father’s inner recesses, into his brain. Is he crazy? Schizophrenic? Now here he is on the street with a fridge full of toys on his back. He plays it off like he’s Santa Claus!

The last reel of Daddy Longlegs elicits very particular emotions, as dread and wonder face off in response to a succession of brilliant ideas—a dialectic that fills us with awe as the film takes flight, as every great film must in its own way (for despite its humble appearances, this is assuredly a great film). The film’s final lyricism reveals a stick-thin guy carrying a huge fridge on his back like Sisyphus rolling his stone, a guy who will never make it, who is both funny and awful but never pathetic or pitiful. The Safdies avoid opening the door to pathos, which would have been so easy and so disagreeable. The dialectic tension does not slacken for a moment. It’s exhausting, but it commands admiration. “I’m not kidding,” Lenny says at the end. No more messing around. With a sense of giddiness, our emotions take flight, as the mournful trumpets of Michael Hurley’s “Penguins” usher the two little penguins onto the Roosevelt Island cable car and that space capsule rises over the abyss. Where is he going? Where is he taking them? Nowhere other than the realm of the wildest poetry. But by what mystery do these desperate, frightening images warm our hearts? By what mystery do we also feel gratitude toward the two brothers? Here is the magic of a cinema entirely driven by love streams.

Translated from the French by Nicholas Elliott

Daddy Longlegs: Presto Magic!

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