Daddio
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes
Stars: Sean Penn, Dakota Johnson
Writer/Director: Christy Hall
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
Movies that take place almost entirely within the confines of an automobile are surprisingly plentiful: Driving Miss Daisy, Tom Hardy’s Locke, Tom Cruise’s Collateral, and Steven Spielberg’s breakthrough TV movie, Duel, are just a few. Plus, you can throw in variations on that cramped quarters theme: claustrophobic thrillers like Speed and Phone Booth.
The trick to a driver-and-passenger drama is in making darned sure these cinematic traveling companions are people we don’t mind being up close and personal with for 90 minutes or so. First-time feature writer-director Christy Hall largely accomplishes that feat in Daddio — a compelling two-character drama in which Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson (Fifty Shades of Gray) invite us to share a real-time taxi ride from JFK Airport to midtown Manhattan.
Johnson plays a conflicted businesswoman, known to us only as “Girlie” — a nickname bestowed upon her by Clark (two-time Oscar-winner Penn), the driver who draws her into conversation almost before his cab rolls away from the JFK arrivals gate. There is a third, unseen character in the drama: Girlie’s unnamed boyfriend, who floods her cell phone with longing, and occasionally pornographic, texts. Watching Girlie’s face through the rearview mirror, Clark can’t see those messages, but he recognizes fleeting moments of indecision and regret — along with an occasional hint of lusty abandon.
Squinting into the oncoming headlights, casting quick glances toward the back seat, Penn at first keeps us guessing when it comes to his intentions toward Girlie. On one hand, it’s clear he’s just one of those drivers who will not let his fares sit in silence all the way to Midtown; they’re going to engage with him whether they like it or not. On the other, he seems particularly attentive to Girlie. For some time into the film, we half expect Girlie to glance up from her phone and say, “Hey, wait…this isn’t my exit…!”
For her part, Girlie is transmitting a whole lot of mixed signals from the back seat: One minute she’s obnoxiously aloof; the next she’s sharing shockingly intimate details that hint at a desire for company on the other side of the plexiglass barrier.
To relate the many emotional twists and power shifts that occur during the ride would ruin much of the fun in Daddio. Like a skilled cabbie changing lanes in traffic, screenwriter Hall deftly keeps this one-way drive from ever feeling linear: At one moment Clark is prying intimate life details from Girlie, trying to help her emerge from the dark forest of her own creation. At another it’s Clark in the confessional, offering his own hard-won life lessons — still in the service of changing this sad-eyed woman’s life for the better.
“At the end of the day,” he tries to reassure her, “everything comes into focus.”
A silent beat, and Clark realizes he’s slipped into the realm of useless platitudes.
“And then,” he adds softly, “it goes out again.”
Penn, pleasingly grizzled and gravel-voiced, has never been better. His Clark evokes a sweetly disarming warmth seldom seen in the actor’s work; an understated kindness that flies in the face of the impatient, intense characters he’s created for films like Milk and The Professor and the Madman. In Girlie, Johnson fashions a character at once fragile and ferocious; a woman whose life choices may not be the best ones, but who will loudly defend her right to make them.
By the time Girlie is dropped off at her Manhattan destination, there is little reason to believe her life has been fundamentally changed by her hour or so in Clark’s cab of candor, at least in the short run. In fact, at the final fadeout, it’s Clark who seems to have been the one more profoundly affected by the ride.
“You don’t drive a cab for 20 years and not know people,” says Clark. As he watches Girlie disappear behind the doors of her brownstone, Daddio offers one last revelation: This may be the first fare in all that time that helped him know more about himself.
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