Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
Ronald Bronstein is nominated for three Oscars this year: as co-writer, producer, and co-editor of Marty Supreme. He also produced his wife Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs I'd Kick You. And he has credits as executive producer on Sarah Sherman's comedy special and the documentary about Paul Reubens. A good year. Before that, Bronstein played a key role in the Safdie Brothers Cinematic Universe as a writer and producer, and he starred in their 2009 film Daddy Longlegs. His own feature as director, Frownland (2007), is awfully strong in its own right. (All of these films can be found at Scarecrow, of course.) So, a nod here, with my Herald reviews of those two titles.
Frownland
The next time somebody suggests that Juno or Lost in Translation is an independent movie, you might refer them to Frownland, a film shot on 16 mm. with first-time actors and no discernable budget. More than that sort of cred, Frownland is also stubbornly resistant to any crowd-pleasing impulse. A movie sure to inspire some walkouts, this is a decidedly tough one to warm up to.
I'm not sure I did warm up to it, but this picture has something—its own integrity, at the very least. From the opening sequence, in which we are introduced to the sniveling life of Keith (Dore Mann), a lonely guy living on the fringes of New York City, this world is difficult to look at.
Keith, who stutters and cringes his way through a weird half-life (surely he has never seen sunlight), goes about his rounds: selling coupon books door-to-door, trying to get a rent payment out of his slugabout roommate Charles (Paul Grimstad), and haplessly edging toward a woman (Mary Wall) who may or may not be an ex-girlfriend (there are some relationships in this film I couldn't decipher).
Dore Mann, a distant relative of writer-director Ronald Bronstein, physically resembles a Paul Giamatti for whom nothing good ever happened. He gives an amazing performance, in an unvarnished kind of way.
For a while, the movie veers off from Keith to follow Charles, a character who had loftily dismissed Keith earlier but who turns out to be just as luckless. His experiences trying to get a job provide glimpses of comic relief.
Frownland needs to catch its viewer in the right frame of mind, because this is not an easy film. It strikes me as highly authentic, however. Certainly, it makes Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer look like a Hollywood musical by comparison; at least that book's hero had the ecstasy of art. Keith is just miserable.
Daddy Longlegs
Lenny, the central figure of Daddy Longlegs, is a singular character in movies: irresponsible, self-centered, a loose cannon distinguished by one hard-to-reconcile fact: he's furiously attached to his children.
The only movie antecedents for this character would be those film noir anti-heroes (Richard Widmark in Night and the City, say) who scramble from one scheme to the next, always missing their chance and perpetually disappointing the people who've made the mistake of loving them.
On that last point, Lenny's two young sons don't have much choice. He's their father, and they are in his custody for only two weeks a year—how can they not love this unstructured, chaotic man, so much a child himself, even if he sometimes scares them?
Daddy Longlegs follows Lenny during the two weeks he has custody, a manic period in which he bops through Manhattan (and, in one foolish escapade, a trip to upstate New York with two people he barely knows), trying to juggle a semi-girlfriend and his job as a projectionist at a revival theater.
Filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie begin the movie with a dedication to their own father (and others), and you wonder how much of the film is autobiographical. If any of it is, Daddy Longlegs qualifies as a remarkable act of filial sympathy, a non-judgmental attempt to portray a complicated, colorful, and sometimes unforgivable figure.
One episode has Lenny drugging his boys (played by expressive real-life brothers Sage and Frey Ranaldo) so they'll sleep through the night when he has to work. This dangerous and stupid move comes out of Lenny's cracked idea of love: he wants to "protect" them from freaking out when they wake up and he's not there, so he risks their health in the process.
This intriguing film, shot in a jagged, quick-on-the-uptake style familiar from umpteen indie pictures, would not be half as successful without the fascinating presence of Ronald Bronstein in the lead role. Bronstein also contributed to the script and he fully captures Lenny's wheedling, hustling ways (Lenny is always trying to get someone to bail him out of a jam by proclaiming, "This time it's a real emergency," which understandably leaves him stranded when he actually has real emergencies).
Bronstein is a filmmaker, too; his Frownland is also a terrific character study, if harder to watch than this more expansive film. When a movie makes you curious about what happens next to an off-putting character, it has succeeded—and in that sense, the Safdies and Bronstein have thoroughly succeeded.
January 30, 2026
