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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
DADDY LONGLEGS Daddy Longlegs has the heartfelt acuity of autobiographical experience, albeit from sons who are extraordinarily aware of their parents’ flaws. The Safdie brothers (Josh and Benny) fictionalize and telescope their divorced parents’ custody battle into a two-week period, and they try to be fair to both of their parents’ best intentions. The film opens with a dedication that could be a warning or an excuse—long and fond to their father, who in interviews they say they consider a friend, while giving short shrift to their mother, who primarily raised them. The father here is Lenny, played by Ronald Bronstein, better known as the director of Frownland. He looks and moves so spookily like Michael Richards as Cosmo Kramer in Seinfeld that it’s not surprising that he’s pretty much the kind of father we would expect Kramer to be—quixotic, spontaneous, selfish, and more than a bit daft. Unlike Kramer, Lenny manages to be gainfully employed to pay the rent on his studio apartment; like Bronstein’s real job, he’s a projectionist. His sons are Sage and Frey, played very naturally by the 10- and 8-year-old Ranaldo brothers, sons of Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo and artist Leah Singer, who portrays their briefly seen mother as the shrill shrew their dad perceives her to be. When he picks them up from school to embark on fortnight’s stay with him crosstown in Manhattan, it might as well be a parallel universe away from the mature structure their mother has provided. On a movie scale of eccentric childcare, the chaotic two weeks with their father is luckily more like a vacation with Auntie Mame than the Running with Scissors household. Suspense builds as to just how irresponsible Lenny can be. He importunes a young comic artist neighbor to babysit and cajoles a one-night stand to bring along the kids for an upstate weekend with her mysterious boyfriend. But Lenny keeps topping himself with the risks he takes. The precarious life of a single father is a bit more than he can cope with. For the kids, this is a freewheeling wonderland, but some in the audience could start feeling uncomfortably like the scolding fish in The Cat in the Hat as the boys’ meals and their daily routine become more and more erratic. Even when the father’s hopeless irresponsibility endangers the brothers’ lives, there are no apparent repercussions. That makes Lenny’s desperate effort to extend their stay beyond his delegated two weeks a year a confusing show of bravura to demonstrate his love for his children. While this isn’t quite the extreme grist of Lifetime TV movies, his choices would rate as most parents’ nightmares. Yet the Safdies seem to only reluctantly want to admit that love is not enough.
There is more plot development and character insight here than
in Josh’s debut The Pleasure of Being Robbed. (Eléonore Hendricks
is again featured as a similarly thoughtless slacker.)
But, unlike Yong Kim’s Treeless Mountain and Lance Hammer’s
Ballast
about parentless children, the Safdies imitate but don’t
quite master the improvisatory styles of their cited influences John
Cassavetes and Abbas
Kiarostami. There isn’t
enough shape and direction to satisfactorily pace an unsentimentally
poignant story, and there’s no explanation for Lenny’s almost crazy
behavior. Just because the boys’ time with their dad is chaotic doesn’t
mean the film has to be.
Nora Lee Mandel
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