It’s late at night when Dakota Johnson hops into a yellow taxicab at Kennedy airport in the new film Daddio. She’s just going home to Manhattan, 44th Street, between 9th and 10th avenues. And her cab driver (Sean Penn) decides to strike up a conversation that will last the duration of this nearly 100-minute ride. There is no “quiet” setting cab.
This is not a horror movie, though for some a chatty driver on an unexpectedly long trip might be close. It’s not the beginning of a wild Collateral-style night either. No, these two people from different generations, different life experiences and different classes just talk about everything — life, mistakes, technology, human nature, what makes a New Yorker, absentee fathers, affairs, human nature and love.
Daddio was written and directed by Christy Hall, a playwright. Though we are also technically stuck in a cab with Girlie (Johnson) and Clark (Penn), Hall makes it feel rather cinematic, whether her camera is in close up on her actors, a rear-view mirror, a phone screen or letting us breathe for a moment with a shot outside of the cab, on the New York skyline. Claustrophobic it is not.
That’s not to say that some of the conversations won’t have you squirming in your skin a bit. The vast majority of those come from Clark, a Boomer with a heart of gold and some ideas about life that haven’t aged particularly well.
Taboo subjects and ideas that might get a person “cancelled” on social media are of course part of the point of this journey, in which two people who wouldn’t ever find themselves in an extended, soul-bearing conversation with each other under normal circumstances do.
