Director: Christy Hall
Writer: Christy Hall
Stars: Dakota Johnson, Sean Penn, Marcos A. Gonzalez
Synopsis: A woman taking a cab ride from JFK engages in a conversation with the taxi driver about the important relationships in their lives.
A film like Daddio shouldn’t work, but it does. After all, how can you enjoy (or even support) a film seen through a feminist lens that has a weathered Sean Penn saying the word “panties” a half dozen times without some kickback from the media and the audience? That’s a bit of a high-wire act. Imagine being brave enough to fill a script with revelations with a limited cast of characters that run the risk of being unrelatable to its audience.
Yet, the script from the up-and-coming filmmaker Christy Hall is clever in the way it draws the audience in and fosters forgiveness for its characters. Even a chance meeting between two strangers in a New York City cab, usually ending with little to no communication and a two-star review, is transformed into something compelling.
Hall’s script is a bottleneck story that follows only two characters. The film starts with a young woman, simply known as “Girlie” (Dakota Johnson), looking for a cab ride back to her New York City apartment after flying into John F. Kennedy International Airport. She has had a long flight from her small Oklahoma hometown in Girlie, described as the “armpit” of the state’s panhandle.
Girlie is young, beautiful, independent, and confident. Her steely blue eyes stand out among her bleach-blonde hair when the highway lights catch them through the car window just right. Girlie’s driver, Clark (Sean Penn), is a different story. He has a bad haircut and a vintage Tom Selleck mustache, a face like a catcher’s mitt, a rough texture, and deep wrinkles showing signs of age.
Clark has been a cabbie for a lifetime. As a young man, he met his wife while driving her from a club. He manipulates Girlie into talking, weaving a story about how many don’t tip well since most cabs have gone cashless. However, an unexpected connection starts between them—nothing sexual, just two people who develop an alliance over shared struggles and grief.
Writer and director Christy Hall’s Daddio is engaging and entertaining, thanks to the magnetic performances of Johnson and Penn. Their expressive eyes convey stories from both perspectives, speaking volumes in a single look. Through non-verbal communication, they offer enough emotional depth that most actors can only dream of.
Hall’s script focuses on the presence and internal conflict within the characters when the conversation reaches a standstill. This technique works because both characters start at opposite ends of the spectrum. Johnson is young, modern, and likable, while Penn is gruff, set in his ways, and lacks sensibility and boundaries.
In any other script, Penn’s behavior would drag the film down. In another movie, it wouldn’t be believable how open she would be to talking about her life with a man like that, where one may be guarded. However, when we read the text messages from Girlie’s boyfriend, they make Penn’s Clark look like a gentleman by comparison, drawing the audience in.
This is a terrific first-time feature by Hall, who writes a script with addictive, snappy dialogue that’s empathetic as you can see the boundaries slowly wash away. While the ending lacks an emotional punch, it somehow finds a mutual grey area where both characters share uncertainties or ambiguities of their lives that become profoundly human and how the briefest connections can leave a lasting mark.
That alone makes Daddio worth watching because of the spiritual intimacy lost since the pandemic but now is making a comeback because we no longer can hide behind our phones to prevent us from looking over complexities of what it means to be human.
That’s what Christy Hall’s film is about. We need to go above and beyond by truly trying to seek and understand someone instead of tearing down because you never know what someone is truly going through at the moment.
