Daddy Long Legs: The Pleasures of Being Kidnapped

The only Daddy scene Bronstein can watch, he adds,  is its nail-biting climax, in which Lenny, unable to love or care for his kids in any sort of traditional fashion, kidnaps his sons and transports them across the border ... to Queens. For the shell-shocked grade-schoolers, it might as well be another planet.  For the Safdies, it’s a dramatization of a scene from their family history.

“Dad did wake us up one morning,” Benny says, “and our bunk bed was the only thing that was not packed up.” Josh picks it up from there: “And he was, like, ‘We’ve got to go.’ And I was, like, ‘What about school?’ He was, like, ‘No, no, no. We’ve got to get into the truck.’ And we got into the truck, and we moved to the outskirts of Queens. And our mom got a phone call: ‘Why aren’t the kids at school?’ And she called our dad’s number, and it was rerouted. We were just sitting there in the new apartment, and we plugged the phone in, and the second we plugged it in, it started ringing. It was our mother.” (Amazingly, Daddy producer Tom Scott got the brothers a 10-minute segment on CNN, as firsthand experts on familial kidnapping.)

PHOTO BY JARED GRUENWALD

Manhattan gamers: Josh and Benny Safdie

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• Ronald Bronstein
• Daddy Long Legs
• Josh Safdie
• Greta Gerwig
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The next Safdie film, set in Manhattan’s Jewelry District, will also be partially inspired by their father — Benny’s memories of him coming home with cases full of gems dovetail into the brothers’ romanticization of a New York City where the sleaze sparkles. But with few visible signs left of the Manhattan where a 14-year-old Josh roamed 42nd Street trying to get into strip clubs (or where a young Benny once watched two men move his father’s car out of its prime parking space by lifting it), the pair have their radars for romantic sleaze pointed West.  

“I want to live above a fading Buster Keaton mural–adorned grate in Hollywood,” Josh moons. “I want to help scrub the stars with my toothbrush.”