Even in an increasingly secular America, the faithless have their confessors — those strangers, all but unseen behind a divider, ready and willing to lend an ear, a note of empathy, perhaps even some advice, if not absolution. I’m speaking, of course, of the taxicab drivers: the chauffeurs of the urban jungle, the mobile therapists, the keepers of many secrets.
At least that’s the function cabbies have often served across generations of film and television, before the modern era of ride-share apps and AI automation that continues to chip away at the endangered art of casual conversation with a fellow Homo sapiens. In her debut feature Daddio, set almost completely in a taxicab, writer-director Christy Hall acknowledges this reality; her movie is on the precipice of a period piece. “Yellow cabs are like Blockbuster,” says driver Clark (Sean Penn), a soon-to-be professional relic, to his unnamed passenger (Dakota Johnson) while commuting her from JFK to her Hell’s Kitchen apartment. Even the conceit of Johnson’s character, a wired millennial, selecting a taxi instead of an Uber feels so 20th century.
But Hall, evidently, is a romantic who appreciates the retro potential of an old-school transportation tête-à-tête in a dinged-up yellow vehicle. So we saddle up for the ride, whose bumps, rest assured, are purely emotional.
Clark, we soon learn, is the kind of man who still calls his female passengers “sweetheart” and “honey.” He’s curious, observant and has lots of opinions, most of them guarded by a veneer of cynicism thicker than the fiberglass partition separating him from his charges. Johnson, referred to only as “Girlie” in the script, is a computer programmer returning home after two weeks in Oklahoma to visit to her older sister. From the privacy of the backseat, she contributes, fretfully, to a text thread from an eager person who, to put it in PG terms, wants her more deeply than she wants him at this moment in time. She seems far more comfortable, a tad sportive and flirtatious even, with the loquacious driver 30 years her senior, as conversation eventually wends its way toward buried traumas, recollections of regrets, and personal revelations.
The more time you spend with Daddio, the more apparent it becomes that Hall conceived the movie originally as a play, to be presented in the round, with the vehicle mounted onto a moving platform. But, especially for a playwright-turned filmmaker, Hall brings a smart visual style to the proceedings, changing up the editing rhythms and the sense of space — the camera volleying between characters or lingering on them; the space expanding or contracting — to align with the lightness or intensity of the dialogue.
But structurally, the movie is transparent to a fault, and feels hemmed in by the novelty of its conceit. Its division into “acts” — separated by the uncomfortable text thread between Girlie and her suitor — betrays its stagebound origins. And, because a nocturnal drive from JFK to Midtown Manhattan is not usually a feature-length commute, Hall has her characters endure a good half-hour of highway gridlock to artificially extend the narrative. It’s a film that literally doesn’t go anywhere during this time, an apt metaphor for this especially draggy section.
Hall’s dialogue, too, is as tidy as the story structure. Her script inserts a lot of ideas from philosophy and pop psychology — life is a binary of ones and zeroes, truths and falsehoods; an abusive story from Girlie’s past is a metaphor for her current entrapment — and calls back to them in writerly ways. It’s all a little too neat, a little too facile, even a little — and it kills me to say this about a female artist’s work — man-splainy.
Hall’s skills as a director are on subtle display throughout Daddio, and her writing, while better tethered to the stage, is at least earnest and un-cynical about the transformative potential of human communication. It’ll be interesting to see her next project, which hopefully will expand her world-building outside the cramped confines of a canary-yellow confessional.
DADDIO. Director: Christy Hall; Cast: Dakota Johnson, Sean Penn; Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics; Rated R; Opens June 28 at many area theaters