One of the most difficult things when watching a movie is to separate yourself from the character. Though it is difficult to accept they might be doing something that is completely beyond you, it’s also part of the experience. Sometimes characters do things that most can’t fathom (see: “L’Enfant” or “Ossos,” both about people trying to pawn their baby) but these things are often part of the realism of the situation (in those cases, poverty and immaturity). But can a director go too far and expect the audience to suspend their disbelief until it snaps, just to make a compelling character study? This is the problem with Josh and Benny Safdie’s “Daddy Longlegs.”
Our first glimpse of the daddy himself, Lenny (Ronald Bronstein, director of “Frownland”), shows him in a small hot dog shop looking for a footlong. Settling for two hot dogs on a big bun, he hops a fence, trips, drops the dog, picks it off the ground and decides its the funniest thing ever. He then proceeds to lie on the grass in the park, not a care in the world, taking in the moment. This scene perfectly sets up the character, proving him to be childish, impulsive, immature, and rather senseless.
The film continues, shot in a gritty, hand-held style, as divorced Lenny takes his kids (played by Sage and Fray Ranaldo, children of Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth) for a two-week stint. We are treated to some fairly typical single parent struggles: juggling work and child care; the pain-in-the-ass ex wife that constantly clashes with Lenny and his unconventional parenting ways; the children refusing to go to bed. It’s all pretty standard and expectable, and the Safdies manage to do these overdone topics pretty well. There’s also some charm to be found as Lenny plays ‘the cool dad’ with the kids; their playful scenes are joyful and cute. It’s when the Safdies decide to go off the beaten path that the film devolves into nonsense.
Here is where things get extremely difficult. Though the film is essentially about a dad who is still a child inside, this character is still a person and should act like a person in the world constructed around him. Often a director will do something against the norm, which will align more with what the director is trying to say or present rather than with typical realism. It may or may not work for some audience members, but screwing around with the narrative for art’s sake is usually a risk worth taking. In “Daddy Longlegs,” Lenny often makes pretty awful parenting decisions, some being more harmful than others. These decisions are boiled down to things he didn’t think through or didn’t know, which is fine, until it becomes insulting to the viewer.
There are two scenes that push the viewer too far, one taking place right in the beginning. Lenny swindles his way into a road trip for him and his children to upstate New York with a woman he has just slept with and her boyfriend. As he appears near their car, the couple are put off my the inclusion of the children; the boyfriend is already upset that even Lenny was coming. However, the trip continues as planned, and the children and their father have a great time. What? Why would the boyfriend, portrayed as very irritable and firm, allow a person he doesn’t know (with kids) to come along for the road trip? An even worse scene has Lenny having to leave the kids unattended until he returns from an all-nighter shift. He decides to give the children sleeping medicine, something he takes to “sleep through the garbage trucks in the morning.” After work, he returns to the apartment only to find his children stuck in a coma induced by the drugs, which they only wake up from days later. You can probably chalk up the earlier scene to the boyfriend character having a soft spot (one that the Safdies failed to show) but you’d be hard pushed to argue how stupid someone can be to give their children sleeping drugs so they won’t wake up and find their apartment empty. Of course, it fits with the whole “father has no idea what he’s doing” premise, but its almost belittling to be expected to buy that an adult, child-like or not, would drug their children so they wouldn’t awake to an empty home. It’s nothing but poor writing.
There are also small nitpicky things which end up ruining the greater narrative, such as Lenny’s ex-wife. Her character, seemingly only designed to clash with Lenny and his unconventional ways, is nothing but a caricature and is much too stoic and flat to be a person. There is absolutely nothing about her that would suggest she and Lenny were once married, from big things like her personality to little casting decisions such as how downright old she is in comparison to him. It may sound silly, but the film is about Lenny’s life and a good chunk of that has to do with his parenting. If we can’t even believe in his relationship history, why would we invest any time in caring about him or what the Safdies are trying to say?
At first it seems difficult to like this film because the characters are constantly making silly mistakes, but in the end it’s apparent that the entire film is just lazily constructed. There are few reasonable things that take place. Even the cinematography and editing, with its hand-held close-ups and constant cutting, merely give off the feeling that the film-makers are covering up mistakes due to improv or bad acting, rather than making active stylistic choices. There are a few interesting things here and there, such as Lenny constantly getting into trouble and learning lessons only to make the same mistake again and again (much like a teenager), but they’re buried in a swamp of unbelievable scenes that practically scream the directors’ intentions, without a care in the world for how a human being would really act in these situations. This film isn’t trying to say anything (at least, there must be something more to it than ‘don’t leave your kids with stupid assholes’ or “cool Dads aren’t what they seem”) but is meant to be a character study of a Dad who just won’t grow up. But we can’t relate to this character, we can’t respect this character, and we can’t learn anything we don’t already know, so what’s the point? [D-]