The Big Picture
- Christy Hall’s risky feature debut locks audiences inside a yellow cab with suboptimal results.
- Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn carry the entire film via conversation, which is a tall order.
- Performance power cannot overcome the tangled themes in this psychosexual dissection of relationships, self-worth, and forbidden love.
Writer and director Christy Hall selects a challenging route for her feature debut Daddio. The film unfolds inside a New York City taxi cab, flipping between backseat closeups or dashboard wide angles. Money saved on production locations is spent on A-list actors, but too much relies on chatty banter between a duo of performers who shoulder the film's entire weight. It's a character study akin to HBO’s Taxicab Confessions by way of Chicken Soup for the Soul, which loses steam halfway through transportation purgatory. Exchanges can be sweet as strangers speak bluntly about everything from ex-wives to panty vending machines, but also exhausting, idling through 100 minutes of softcore driver-passenger psychoanalysis.
What Is 'Daddio' About?
Dakota Johnson plays an experienced New Yorker who hails a yellow cab from JFK Airport to Manhattan. She's returning home from Oklahoma’s armpit after a family visit, later at night, with only a drunken horndog of a lover blowing up her phone in search of nudes. Her driver, Clark (Sean Penn), strikes up a conversation early in their travels, complimenting his unnamed passenger on not obsessively checking her smartphone (right before another surge of lewd texts and “dick pics”). This instigates a dialogue between people with time to kill and almost zero chance of ever meeting again, which becomes more candid as the odometer tallies passing miles. Clark lends an ear to the woman's problems, but what are his ultimate intentions?
At first, Hall doesn't define any dominant tone for Daddio. Clark's line of questioning grows more intimate and borderline invasive rather quickly; Penn's gravely New Yawk accent could pass as flirtatiously slick or manipulatively skeevy. We're unsure if Johnson's youthful blondie is in danger, but Daddio never wants to be Collateral or Spree. Before long, Johnson and Penn forge a chummy rapport that erases any looming speculations. Clark abides by caricatures of cabbies doling sage wisdom (with Big Apple charms), while Johnson's rider flings the door open to her current issues. Hall fantasizes about a world where humans communicate freely, without text bubbles, but the situation feels synthetically uncertain even in this verbal utopia.
Johnson and Penn are glued to interior upholstery, locked in a competition to one-up personal shitstorms, while cinematographer Phedon Papamichael abuses split diopter windows. Against these restrictions, there's a sincerity to their no-holds-barred discussions. Something is endearing about the catharsis each finds confessing painful truths to veritable nobodies, but also fabricated about their whimsical cab ride filled with safe existential soul-searching. Penn's aged playboy is a fountain of gender clichés that Johnson's listener rolls with both humorously and combatively, serving advice like a tipsy divorced uncle on Thanksgiving. Clark doesn't censor his takes on cheaters and womanizers, nor does Johnson's "Girlie" fear judgment. Daddio can be refreshingly honest in spurts — until conceptual allure fades.
'Daddio' Doesn't Understand Dashcam Filmmaking
Unfortunately, Hall's screenplay translates into a rather pedestrian take on forbidden romances that blabs itself in circles. Daddio stretches far too long for its monotonous structure, unlike a title like H4Z4RD or Dash that understands dashcam filmmaking grows staler than the air in an unwashed rideshare vehicle without adrenaline jumpstarts. As Johnson's patron pulls back the curtain on her taboo connection to Mr. "Show Me Your Pink" (that phrasing makes my skin crawl), Clark's advice comes across as sterile. There's supposed to be a generational comparison between Clark the Boomer philanderer and Johnson's starry-eyed sidepiece, but words address conflicts with blasé enthusiasm. Hall writes from a softball tone that hardly harshens or provokes, diminishing the impactfulness of emotionally charged anecdotes with meandering meanings.
Daddio is a repetitive and reductive experiment in dialogue-driven storytelling. Visual accents are standard New York City highways and skylines, which don't add much beyond the stench of hot dog vendors should Clark roll down his window. Johnson and Penn aren't the problem here; choice conversations uplift what's otherwise AM radio talk show material. It's never incendiary, enigmatic, or challenging enough to justify sticking audiences shotgun as randos blither like long-lost companions. What's initially suggested hardly generates suspense, then the film tells us not to worry, and perpetual mobility becomes even more uninspired. Worse still, its thematic stances cross wires as actors have no choice but to continue chewing through the same dilemmas. The wheels keep turning, but Daddio feels like it goes nowhere.
REVIEW
Daddio
Daddio is a lockbox drama that quickly runs out of fuel as its leads try to talk their way through a host of existential crises.
- Sean Penn nails the "chatty cabbie" personality.
- Dakota Johnson can be charming from the back seat.
- There?s intrigue behind Hall's idea.
- The tone grows flatter as the wheels keep spinning.
- The characters talk in platitudes, which is unfortunate for a film that only speaks.
- At best, it's a 70-minute concept stretched to 100 minutes.
Daddio comes to theaters in the U.S. starting June 28. Click below for showtimes near you.
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