52 Films by Women Vol 8. 38. Daddio (Director: Christy Hall)
Midway through Daddio, Dakota Johnson’s unnamed character describes how she was tied up. My
immediate thought was, ‘oh no, not again.’ Johnson was elevated to stardom for
her role in the Fifty Shades
of Grey films in which her
character, Anastasia, was involved in a sado-masochistic relationship. She was
most recently seen in the critically reviled comic book spin-off, Madame Web, which she only appeared to promote under
sufferance. She hasn’t yet demonstrated that she can be a star across a range
of genres but was effective in a supporting role in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s
directorial debut, The Lost
Daughter, squaring up in one
scene against Olivia Colman.
Written and directed
by Christy Hall, who adapted Colleen Hoover’s novel, It Ends with Us for actor-director Justin Baldoni, Daddio is an accomplished drama, a two-hander set almost entirely in a cab
during which Johnson’s character wrestles with a big question: does she
continue her relationship with a married man?
Her sounding board
is veteran cabbie, Clark (Sean Penn) who initially engages her with a rant
about the death of cash and its effect on his tips. ‘Once, people threw you ten
or twenty dollars. Now paying by credit card, they have to think about it,’ he
moans. His passenger is travelling from JFK to New York City, specifically 44th
Street between 9th and 10th Avenue. However, the fare is
fixed. At one point, when we wonder how a 95-minute film can be sustained by a
45-minute transfer ride, Clark is caught in traffic. Fortunately, the passenger
is Clark’s last fare of the night. He won’t lose any revenue. ‘Congratulations,
you won,’ he tells her. ‘What did I win?’ she asks. ‘Anything you want.’ He
could have added, just don’t ask for a swig from the keep cup. What does he use
it for, besides watering a rubber plant on the dashboard? We find out soon
enough.
Penn, who has worked
with women directors in the past – Kathryn Bigalow & Jessie Nelson in movies,
Deniz Gamze Ergüven and Agnieszka Holland on television – has never shied away
from taking risks with his persona. Here, he is convincingly blue collar, wed
to his cab and the choices he has made. Clark has been married twice, owns a
small house in Jackson Heights (‘it’s a house,’ he repeats, triumphantly) and
has had his share of extra marital affairs, describing his first wife as
‘stupid’. He isn’t penitent. Rather, he has reconciled himself to his own
behaviour. It’s what men do. Having drawn from his passenger that she is from
Gage, Oklahoma, ‘the armpit of the state’, as she illustrates by raising her
right arm, from which she has recently returned, with an unfeasibly small
suitcase for a two-week trip, he asks whether she has a boyfriend or
girlfriend. Her face betrays her. ‘What’s his name?’ ‘I’d rather not say.’ ‘F-
he’s married,’ Clark observes. The passenger doesn’t disagree.
What was the
passenger doing in Gage? She was visiting her sister, whom she describes as a
bitch. ‘Why?’ ‘She mocked my cankles.’ The passenger is rather satisfied with
that body part. No mockery is pleasant. The passenger’s sister lives with a
woman, Eagle. She’s Native American. Clark is impressed but he doesn’t ask what
tribe. He is not sensitised to the issue that Native American women have faced
(according to NBC
news) ‘an epidemic of violence’, and that a legal loophole has prevented
prosecutions. Rather, he just thinks it is cool. As children, the passenger’s
sister would tie her sibling up and leave her in the bath. Mostly so she could
go out and not have to worry about childcare. The passenger further explains
that her mother went out for smokes and never came back, leaving the two girls
to be raised by their father, one girl (the passenger’s sister) eleven years
older than the other.
While Clark engages
the passenger in conversation, she receives texts from her lover, who expresses
a desire to see her. He ‘misses her pink’. It isn’t long before he describes
his condition with graphic clarity, sending her a dick pic. (Daddio earns its UK ’18’ rating.) Clark asks the passenger her age. She won’t
divulge. It makes a difference whether you are in your twenties or thirties, at
least for women. In your thirties [and not in a relationship], you’re finished.
The passenger does reveal her profession. She’s a programmer. Clark asks her to
explain computer programming. To an audience member, we lean forward. Johnson
was ridiculed (unfairly) for her portrayal of a paramedic in Madame Web but Hall gives her better dialogue. Yes,
it’s all ones and zeros. There’s electricity. You can make the ones and zeros
equal ‘true’ or ‘false’. ‘It’s all about being true or false,’ Clark agrees,
sparked by the explanation. He has been one of the false ones.
Clark absolutely
identifies with the passenger’s lover and explains him to her. The guy went
fishing. He just wants what the passenger gives him. He doesn’t want to hear
the ‘L’ word, that the passenger loves him. He won’t leave his wife. He won’t
leave his kids. How many kids does he have? ‘Three,’ explains the passenger,
‘the youngest are twins.’
The passenger’s
dilemma is broken down while they are in a traffic jam. ‘A fender bender,’
Clark deduces. He apologises for the delay. ‘I know these roads like the back
of my hands. I could have turned off.’ There’s no ‘delay repay’ scheme for New
York cabs, but Clark does offer the passenger a stick of gum (the chewing, not
the bubble variety). For her part, the passenger blows a bubble with it, which
does suggest more of a superpower than Madame Web possessed. I always found
Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum to be unyielding.
By this point, the
passenger’s lover wants her to send him sexually explicit photographs so that
he can, as it were, reach a conclusion. We don’t want her to. Clark was
previously grateful that the passenger wasn’t tapping on her phone. ‘You can
take care of yourself,’ he concludes. That phrase is used as a compliment. The
audience knows that it is also disingenuous. If a man tells a woman that she’s
strong, he really means she’s a challenge. He wants to overcome her strength.
Clark ‘knows’ that the passenger wriggled out of her sister’s knots in the cold
bathtub ‘every single time’. He wants her to open up to him, treating their
conversation as a game. The passenger is up, two to nothing. As he explains his
history, Clark scores points.
He tells her how he
met his first wife after she threw up in his cab. A bunch of young women were
travelling home. Clark exalted in hope. Then the vomit. Clark took his cab back
to the garage, hosed it down. Then he found it. Her handbag. She called the
station. He offered to return it in person. The story has a crude ending, told
with a smirk.
The passenger does
make one demand of Clark. When he wants to urinate into his keep cup while in
traffic, she asks him to do it outside. Clark obliges and disappears for a
while. The passenger is lost in thought. We feel her dilemma. Johnson has her
hair dyed blonde and shorter than she has worn it in previous roles. She has a
scarf that she removes early on. Although we see her click a seatbelt on, at a
certain point she isn’t wearing one and leans forward, the hatch that separates
driver and passenger is open. Once the characters have made a connection, Hall
moves from shot-reverse-shot to framing both actors together. Clark’s head is
always in the foreground, but it is his sort that is being interrogated; Penn
plays him like a priest confessing to his parishioner.
Pictured: The unnamed passenger (Dakota Johnson) in love with a married man gets sage advice from veteran cabbie Clark (Sean Penn) in a scene from the taxi-set drama, 'Daddio', written and directed by Christy Hall. Still courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics (US), Sky Movies (UK)
Traffic is
eventually moved on. Clark surveys the two-car wreck. ‘That ain’t no fender
bender,’ he concludes. Daddio has production values, though only four
characters appear in the cast list. The third is the cab controller who asks
waiting passengers for their destinations. The fourth is a young girl in an
adjacent car who smiles at the passenger and appears to offer her a potato
chip.
Nevertheless, what we
see out of the cab window isn’t that interesting, though at one point, the cab
passes a set of buses parked in a depot. To give the impression of speed and
sleekness, cinematographer Phedon Papamichael positions the camera behind the
cab (or possibly attached to it) and close to the road. The film is a love
letter to the New York yellow taxi. Clark complains about being replaced by the
driverless cab. He describes himself as a dinosaur. However, a driverless cab
won’t ask you about your day, at least not with genuine interest, or indeed
tell you about its own day. ‘Mine’s
pretty lousy,’ Clark tells the passenger early on. ‘Lotta short rides.’
In the final
stretch, the passenger reveals what happened in Gage. How it was indeed hard
and how she learned a rain dance that performed an altogether different
function. ‘I wanted it to rain on me,’ the passenger explains, tears running
down her cheeks.
If you had any doubt
(from Madame Web) that Johnson is talented, Daddio dispels it. She reaches deep and comes up true. The title is explained
by the passenger’s lover appearing to be the father she never had. The
passenger went to live with her sister when she was six years old. On the day
she left, the last time she saw him, this man, who had never so much as hugged
her or patted her on the back – ‘an f-ing high five would be nice’ – walked
over and shook her hand. His grip, she describes, was like sandpaper. However,
during that two weeks in Gage, when she and her sister ‘drank and drank’, her
older sister explains that no such handshake took place. Could the passenger
really have created such a false memory. There is an inference: that her belief
that she and her lover have a connection could be false as well. Clark is
certainly impressed that he showed her pictures of his kids. ‘He let you in,’
he explains.
After admitting that
he had never met a real cowboy, Clark scores some more points explaining his
‘bucket list’. He had always wanted to go to Japan where there are vending
machines with ‘women’s panties’ in them. ‘Don’t say panties,’ the passenger
scolds him. On his list was a desire to go scuba diving. Clark tried it last
year, went a little way down, ‘didn’t see a shipwreck or nothing,’ but had a
problem accepting that he could breathe underwater; he didn’t trust the
equipment. This becomes Hall’s key metaphor. The passenger has to learn that
she can breathe underwater, that is, exist outside of her current relationship.
It doesn’t matter that her lover gave her his card and she called him. That was
just part of the guy’s technique, Clark explains. ‘How long before he moved to
a private email?’ he asks. After the passenger gives Clark the tip of the month
(‘I have no cash’), he holds out his hand, but she refuses to take it, cupping
his face instead. The passenger has the strength to remake herself. For his
part, Clark swaps the name he would give himself from Vinnie to Mikey. The
passenger has made him consider whether his first wife, on whom he played
tricks, and who played a trick on him, was really stupid. You can choose to
laugh or choose to get mad. Clark’s first wife chose the former, clearly
wanting to keep him as long as possible. Daddio doesn’t have
any actual gags but encourages us to laugh more. It’s a good message.
Reviewed on Sky
Movies (UK streaming service), Sunday 1st September 2024
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