Daddio: Smart Two-Hander Showcases Great Performances and Universal Truths
By Kim Hughes
Rating: A
It’s hard to imagine a more provocative cerebral punch than the one served by Daddio. That the film’s plot is so simple — seen-it-all New York cab driver ferries lone female passenger from JFK to midtown over 90 minutes as they talk with increasing candour — makes the payoff seem bigger still.
It’s no surprise that writer-director Christy Hall is also a playwright; one can easily imagine her feature debut excelling on stage. But the visual bells and whistles afforded by film — the extreme interior close-ups, the galaxy of glowing lights outside the cab as it nears the city — intensify this terrific two-hander starring actors (and real-life Malibu neighbours) Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson.
Apparently, Daddio was inspired by Hall’s watching of the mid-90s reality TV series Taxicab Confessions in which unwitting passengers were filmed spilling their guts to their cab drivers enroute to their destinations and then signed waivers (or didn’t) allowing their confessions to subsequently be aired.
Sticking around for the credits to discover Daddio was mostly filmed on a New Jersey soundstage somehow makes the performances seem even more dazzling. No boozy late-night partying propelling these ferocious anecdotes. This is real life. (Or at least, it’s real life at the movies).
In Daddio, Penn plays Clark, a straight shooter with a sailor’s vocabulary whose decades behind the wheel, gazing into a rearview, have given him particular insights into humanity. Johnson’s attractive but unnamed passenger bears the vague hallmarks of discontent.
Just back from a trip to hometown Oklahoma and reluctantly t/sexting with a married paramour, she is ripe for appraisal. And appraise Clark does, though not all his assumptions prove correct. In fact, some — like his sexist surprise that she is a computer programmer —evens the playing field for his astute passenger.
But Clark is clearly intrigued, volleying between compliments (“A chick who looks 22 but is clearly such a rocket ship”) and admonishments (“Don’t ever say the word ‘love…’ that’s coming from a man married twice with a lot of action on the side.”)
Indeed, Clark’s running rumination on men’s generally predatory approach to women can be viewed both as a warning and a brag. Director Hall strands Clark somewhere in the middle though she ups the ante by having him and Girlie, as Johnson is identified in the credits, begin a friendly competition for who can reveal the most emotionally intense stuff.
Naturally, what follows are increasingly fraught confessions, stories, and theories as bumper-to-bumper traffic caused by an accident forces the pair to sit tight and share the nighttime ether in this confined space.
It’s fascinating stuff, and it rests both on its leads and on the universal truth that unburdening to strangers is often easier than unburdening to intimates, as any real-life cab driver or bartender can attest. And yet, as Daddio shows, that very spontaneous act fosters an intimacy all its own.
Clark and his passenger disseminate and dissect the usual sources of pain. But as their conversational posture volleys between cat and mouse, confessor and arbiter, and man and woman, each display wisdom and bafflement that feels entirely genuine. Hall’s writing is top-notch.
Locke from 2013 — which starred Tom Hardy and also took place almost entirely inside a car — might be another reference point for Daddio.
Both films make genuine hay out of a straightforward premise built on a rock-solid foundation that life is super-weird but somehow, we live it.
Daddio. Written and directed by Christy Hall. Starring Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn. In theatres June 28.