One would be forgiven for thinking that the one-location two-hander Daddio was born from the many restrictions introduced by the advent of Covid, a safe and easy way to make something, anything in the pandemic’s darkest days. It might have made it all a little easier to like, or at least admire, if that were the case but the film, set in a cab ride from JFK airport to Manhattan, has been in the offing for far longer. Originally conceived as a stage play, it transformed into a Black List script in 2017 attracting the attention of Daisy Ridley before morphing once again into a low-key, low-interest fall festival premiere, shot at the end of last year, ushered to the screen by its star and producer, Dakota Johnson.
She plays a programmer landing in New York after a trip to see her half-sister, finding herself in a cab driven by Sean Penn’s chatty everyman. Their back and forth makes up the entirety of the film, fraught questions over age, gender, sex and daddy issues dominating the ride. There are echoes of Steven Knight’s ingenious thriller Locke, a film that pushed us to the edge of our seats via Tom Hardy’s string of relatively mundane yet breathlessly tense car calls or Michael Mann’s Collateral where Jamie Foxx’s cab driver is forced into a violent partnership with Tom Cruise’s backseat assassin. But while it’s easy to see where Daddio might have taken a lurch into genre territory, it’s a far more grounded psychodrama with touches of comedy, a simple story of two people getting to know each other, a dream for screentime-hungry actors wanting a challenge, less so for those of us watching.
It starts out as something of a nightmarish worst-case scenario for those of us who prefer to stay silent in the back of a taxi with Penn’s salt of the earth cabbie firing question after question at his politely accommodating passenger, nosily inserting himself into her business. When the journey is forced into a halt with an accident up ahead, small talk turns into something of more substance, at least in comparison with what came before, but it’s never quite as gripping or surprising as it needs to be given the no-frills setup. There’s a vital crackle missing from their interplay, one that both actors try their hardest to insert, but writer-director Christy Hall’s dialogue is too expected, too run-of-the-mill to ever really grab us. There are flashes of something more intriguing when Hall shows a refreshing frankness towards sex and how it feeds into the way both characters see themselves and the world around them but too quickly she then opts for easy psychology to tidily explain the hows and whys. It’s not that these types – the bleach blonde other woman with daddy issues and the philandering blue-collar cabbie who speaks in fortune cookie-isms – don’t exist it’s just that they have existed too many times for us to find interest in them existing again, at least without any new insight.
While Hall’s script might keep us at a remove, her direction takes us closer to something that feels more real, managing to conjure the specific thrill of travelling from the airport to the city at night, the hum of possibility increasing with every mile and finding ways to make what could have felt like a static location come alive, putting us in the car right next to her characters. Life is also breathed into the film by her two stars, making the very most of the limited exercise, Johnson further proving herself to be magnetic regardless of the material (a skill learned early from the Fifty Shades franchise) and Penn bringing a movie star ease we haven’t seen from him for too long. They almost make it work but, like us, they’re searching for something that isn’t quite there, a thankless road to nowhere.
Daddio is screening at the Toronto film festival with a release date to be announced
