Daddy Longlegs

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) is a comedy drama movie co-written and directed by the Safdie Brothers and it follows a father juggling his kids with the rest of his responsibilities and he is ultimately faced with the choice of being their father or their friend. This movie was a first time watch for me and it was just freaking fantastic.

Positives for Daddy Longlegs (2009): I really enjoyed the story of this movie and how it was executed. The acting from the cast particularly Ronald Bronstein as Lenny, Sage Ranaldo as Sage and Frey Ranaldo as Frey are great. I also liked the indie filmmaking look of the cinematography to the movie. The movie has a great pace to the story with scenes flowing perfectly. And finally, I like that the movie ends on a note that allows the audience to decide how the story ends for the characters.

Negatives for Daddy Longlegs (2009): Aside from the main story, there isn't anything else going on in the movie. You also have this conflict between the main character and his ex-wife that feels pointless and could've been cut for time.

Overall, Daddy Longlegs (2009) is a fantastic movie from the Safdie Brothers and the beginning of their excellent dynamic as co-writers and directors.

Go Get Some Rosemary (also titled as 'Daddy Longlegs') is a truly great film. It pulls no punches and shows the mark of some truly great up and coming filmmakers in their earlier days. It also features a wonderful and memorable performance from Ronald Bronstein, who also co-wrote the film.

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.

Safdie Brothers once again never try to polish their characters or make them likable. They just lets them exist, in this case stumbling through parenthood and poor decisions with a strange kind of honesty. It's not an easy watch, but it's an incredibly genuine one.

A chaotic tenderness that feels both funny and heartbreaking, the kind that only real life can offer.