TMS Movie Review: Daddio

(Sony Pictures)

I’ll be honest, movies like Christy Hall’s Daddio usually go in one ear, out the other with me [i.e. films set during a car ride for 90-100 minutes with only a couple of characters speaking to each other]. Yes, I’m even including Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991) and Steven Knight’s Locke (2013) here. These are essentially stage plays, but executed on a road, and they heavily rely on both the performances and the writing for the viewer to be invested. If you’re not interested in the characters, the movie will be a snooze. For me, this concept is just a little too gimmicky. With Locke, you could at least sense some tension from Tom Hardy’s character rushing to the birth of his child while simultaneously dealing with other dilemmas on his car phone. With Daddio, it’s a lot more casual.

In Hall’s writing and directing screen debut, there’s an unnamed, young computer programmer portrayed by Dakota Johnson taking a taxicab from JFK Airport to her apartment in Manhattan. When her drive is paused because of an accident in the middle of the freeway, the woman and the aging driver, Clark (Sean Penn), gradually chat about topics including work, society, sex and relationships for the next hour and a half.

(Sony Pictures)

I think the problem I have with the concept of two strangers having a heart-to-heart in a short period of time is that I would never get this personal with someone I literally just met moments ago. It’s definitive suspension of disbelief for the audience. Johnson and Penn are fine actors and do a lot with so little here though. Story wise, Daddio does feel like Hall did a double feature of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) before penning her script. The characters aren’t terribly written, and their backgrounds are fine. But at the same time, you could find their personalities in any small budget, semi-indie character drama from the past 50 years. The female lead in Daddio using her cell phone and prominently texting an off-screen character proves it’s possible to enhance drama with modern technology. But unfortunately, Hall also succumbs to the annoying habit a lot of filmmakers do of having their mature, adult characters text like middle schoolers.

This could very much be just a me problem, but I have a feeling Daddio won’t make much of an impression on general audiences either, no matter how they feel about talk heavy stories.