A Long Cab Ride with a Solid Cast Fails to Generate any Reason to Exist Beyond the Chemistry of the two Leads. Besides, Tom Hardy Already made a Compelling Car Ride Film Where he Alone Drives for an Hour and a Half Taking Phone Calls. The Dialogue in Daddio can’t Compete with the Brilliant 2014 Film, Locke.
DIRECTED BY CHRISTY HALL/2024
Christy Hall makes her feature film writing and directing debut with the film Daddio. It has a strong cast featuring Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn. Penn and Johnson have immediate chemistry and make the narrative far more compelling that it really is. By the time the credits roll, I’m not quite sure what was really resolved, but I did enjoy seeing a new Sean Penn performance. The film…not so much.
Dakota Johnson plays Girlie (yes, that is correct!), a woman who has just arrived back in New York after a couple of weeks in her hometown in Oklahoma. She gets into the cab of Clark (Sean Penn) and begins the ride from JFK to her home. The rest of the film is the conversations that are struck up between Girlie and Clark, and how it slowly unveils what Girlie was doing during those 2 weeks in Oklahoma, and who Clark truly was in his younger days and how that has relevance to Girlie’s current situation.
The problem with the narrative, despite the talent of the actors delivering their lines, is that it really isn’t that compelling. We are given a surface level exposure of Girlie’s relationship with her boyfriend through a series of text messages she receives in between bantering back and forth with Clark. Clark, an admitted philanderer, sees through this guy’s approach and seems to serve as the reasonable voice as he conveys to Girlie what this guy is all about. The film finally tries to expose some layers to this surface sexual relationship, but it comes too little, too late, and doesn’t change the fact that Girlie embodies a lot of stereotypes about women that this film seems eager to destroy.
What makes this more difficult to watch is that Tom Hardy already made a much more compelling film where he is the only one in the car, driving an hour and a half from his work to London taking phone calls on his Bluetooth, where his carefully constructed life slowly unravels. Hardy is a one-man tour de force in the film Locke, but with Daddio, a conversation with two people across the real time drive from JFK to home, delayed by an accident, fails to really be all that interesting.
Johnson does well considering the material she is working with, and she is able to connect with the audience to see her sympathetically despite basically being written as a woman who truly believes the flawed man she is dating is able to change…with her help, of course. Penn gets a lot of charm out of copping to having been a philanderer, much like his real-life reputation back in the 1980’s when he was playing Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and marrying Madonna. At the end of the cab ride, both characters seem to have really bonded, but there isn’t much indication that their situations are any different after the ride than they were before Girlie got into Clark’s cab. That is the biggest issue with the film. Why did it need to exist?
As far as 1.5 hour films about car rides in real time where character’s lives are altered forever, Locke is the superior choice. That is the biggest issue facing Daddio. The title makes little sense to the film itself except to betray its feminist intent where a young girl needs a father figure to help validate her and her choices which sends the exact opposite message that all of the dialogue of the film intends to convey.
