DADDIO - Mark Reviews Movies

Daddio, Sony Pictures Classics

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 27, 2024

Daddio follows two people, the passenger and the driver, over the course of a cab ride from the airport to the heart of New York City. Along the way, they talk. That's the simplest summary of writer/director Christy Hall's debut feature, which doesn't sound like much, but it's still fascinating to watch and listen to two intelligent people work through their respective views of the world, as well as other people, and each one's personal issues for a bit more than 90 minutes.

We're at a point in the business of making movies in which plot is king. This movie's stars, Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn, have appeared in their fair share of such projects, although Penn has always been an actor who refuses to be pigeonholed to any particular type and has allowed that attitude to drive his choices for the movies in which he'll appear. Despite her status as a newcomer compared to her co-star, Johnson seems to have a similar instinct for the projects she chooses.

It's little surprise, then, that these two actors would select this material, which is mostly surprising and refreshing for the fact that it is a star-driven movie that possesses not a single hallmark of what one might assume that description to imply. Neither of these actors or the characters they play are glamorous in any way in the movie. It has only one plot point, in that the passenger wants to get home from the airport and it's the driver's job to get her there.

There are various revelations about these two characters, and if one brings the perspective that so many movies these days have trained us to have, the audience might suspect and wait for there to be some kind of unknown connection between these two characters, some detail that sends them on a different route, or some breakthrough occurring between them that changes the nature of their relationship in a dramatic way. Whether or not Hall felt some of pressure to include such ideas in the process of writing or making the movie, none of that happens here. While the movie in front of us definitely has its own conveniences and contrivances to get the characters where they need to go (in more ways than geography), they're minor compared to what could have been.

It's always strange to talk about a movie in terms of what it's not, but that is the impulse in this case. It's almost easier to describe this story for what it isn't, since the setup could have become some kind of high-concept thriller—if, say, the driver possessed some ulterior motive or the passenger's relationship problems spiraled out of control without her realizing it—or even some fateful romance between two strangers. Instead, the story is exactly as uneventful but occasionally meaningful as the conceit of two people talking for a set amount of time can be.

The excuse for this unexpected conversation is that Johnson's character, credited as "Girlie," has returned to New York from a two-week trip to visit family in Oklahoma. She catches a taxi outside the terminal and sits in silence in the backseat, while Clark (Penn), the driver, heads toward the address his passenger has given the attendant.

There's a lot of silence initially, of course, because Girlie is busy reading texts from a guy who's desperate to see her. Eventually, Clark breaks the ice, noting that she's his final fare for the night, that he likes how she isn't always staring at the screen of her phone, and that she must be, like him, a true New Yorker, because she gave him cross streets instead of a specific address.

From there, the conversation grows exponentially deeper, which might seem unlikely except that Johnson and Penn have an easy rapport together and each gives a sense of a character who feels compelled to just talk. Clark is an old-school cabbie, who had many years of gaining small-talk expertise before cellphones eliminated the need and desire for such social niceties, and Girlie, as we soon find out, is in the middle of an affair with a married man whose feelings for her are unclear in her mind.

As Clark eventually puts it, he and Girlie will likely never see each other again when the ride is finished, so what's the harm in her telling him about the guy, the affair, and where the uncertainty lies? In exchange, she wants some information about the driver, who has a lot of opinions about things and people after a couple decades of driving people and more living his own messy life.

There's a constant question if this is a good enough justification for how personal the conversation gets, especially as the dialogue—not to mention the actual driving—stops and starts as Hall tries to get to every point she wants to make here. The performances of Daddio do a lot to sell that, with Johson as the woman who needs answers but is too scared of asking the one person who could give them to her and Penn as a man who finds it almost too easy to slip back into the habit of saying whatever comes into his mind. It's nice to hear two smart and thoughtful people talk, for sure, but the movie's gimmick keeps it from feeling as natural as the leads make it seem.

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