Courtesy of Toronto Film Festival
A taxi driver and his passenger explore provocative ideas about how men and women act in a single New York taxi ride – past superficial chatter and into very personal revelations about themselves.
If the prospect of being stuck in a New York City cab with two characters for about 90 minutes doesn’t sound like your kind of movie, then you’re seriously underestimating “Daddio” writer-director Christy Hall’s ability to keep you captivated for the entire ride. There’s a challenge you could give any first-time filmmaker: make a film that’s just shot in a yellow taxi and changes people’s expectations of the way men and women treat each other. questions. The key, it turns out, is casting (Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn bring “Daddio” to life), hiring a great cinematographer (Phedon Papamichael) and a lot of life experience.
The film begins as a blonde woman (Dakota Johnson) lands at JFK Airport, returning from a trip that was neither business nor pleasure. As she gets into the first yellow cab, she glances at her phone, but then begins a conversation with the driver that takes viewers down a very different route than they might have imagined. Much of the film’s excitement comes from the pure joy of discovery. But it’s made worse by the obvious difference in age and gender: Will Clark (Penn), driving his last taxi of the evening, respect his passenger, or will he make some sort of predatory attack on her?
Casting Penn brings an immediate tension to the dynamic, much like a child might feel trying to pet an unaccompanied pit bull. Penn is an actor we associate with aggression and sex, and so one immediately wonders where such a character could take a woman who, in his own snap judgment, can “handle herself.” Hall wants us to challenge stereotypes – that’s one of the key themes of the film, in which two strangers find out as much as they can about each other over a short period of time.
Clark acts like a cross between a detective and a therapist and pesters his passenger with questions. He considers himself an expert on human nature, able to deduce a person’s personality from just a few clues. Johnson’s character is understandably suspicious and refuses to tell him her name and age (“The moment you hit 30, your value is halved,” she replies), but reveals where she’s from: a small town the armpit of Oklahoma. This surprises him. She looks more worldly. Meanwhile, she’s genuinely surprised when he suspects she’s having an affair with a married man – an older man she’s known to call “Papa.”
This unseen creep serves as a third character, whose presence is felt through a stream of suggestive text messages. Using force of will, she does her best to ignore his demands as he sends her a dick pic and asks her to up the ante. Instead, she concentrates on the slightly flirtatious getting-to-know-you game that develops between the driver and her. She pursed her lips throughout the drive and met his gaze in the rearview mirror in a way that some men might take as offensive. Now the couple starts counting points and gets a point every time one of them says something that destabilizes the other.
For the first half of the trip, she is on the defensive, answering his questions. But about halfway through the traffic comes to a standstill, he slides open the window separating them, and she begins to learn things about her interrogator. Clark admits to having been married several times, clears up his own infidelities, and launches into an elaborate theory about the difference between men and women. “Men know how to do this,” he says, “they poke around to see if there’s any candy to be had.”
Hall throws out these broad generalizations in a way that is intended to positively impact both her main character and the audience, but that doesn’t mean she believes them. Given the parallel conversation playing out on her phone – whose typo-riddled texts leave everything but her lover’s anatomy to the imagination – there seems to be a secondary game afoot that Clark knows nothing about as she tests his theories on her lover (including one about the word “love,” which Clark sees as a dealbreaker in extramarital affairs). The very final salvo in the couple’s text conversation could be cause for endless debate.
Every aspect of “Daddio” is designed to spark conversation. But it’s sweeter and more satisfying than you might expect, especially as Hall elaborates on ideas she introduced at the beginning of her script: There’s talk of tips, half-forgotten handshakes, tied up in bathtubs, and trying to choose between true and false, and all that Hall turns deftly as the taxi reaches its destination. Even the pauses are meaningful, and Johnson’s acting, which seemed slightly over-the-top at the start, develops into something incredibly nuanced towards the end.
While Daddio may not sound cinematic enough to warrant a trip to the cinema, rest assured that DP Papamichael has not only ensured that Hall’s debut film looks great, but that the film also benefits immensely from the undivided attention of the cinematic experience demands as well as the collective discomfort and nervous laughter at the sight of a crowd. The trip may only go from JFK to Midtown, but it covers a lot in that time span.