Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Christy Hall
Starring: Dakota Johnson, Sean Penn
When you land in your city's airport after a trip abroad, taking a taxi
to your home can be a strange experience. You're being ferried through a
city you're familiar with, and yet it feels curiously alien. The journey
from an airport to a city tends to look the same regardless of the city,
an anonymous highway punctuated by the occasional high-rise building in
the distance, until you cross a bridge or emerge from a tunnel into the
outskirts of a city you know well, but which looks like any other city
from this entry point. Seeing your city from a fresh perspective might
cause you to re-evaluate your relationship with the place you now call
home, to consider the role it plays in your life. We move to cities to
find ourselves, but sometimes we get lost in the concrete and glass until
that moment where we realise we're not living the life we desired after
all.
The unnamed female protagonist of playwright Christy Hall's feature film debut Daddio has such a moment while taking a
cab from JFK airport to her home in midtown Manhattan. Having moved from
small town Oklahoma 11 years earlier, Dakota Johnson's "Girlie" (for
that's how she's credited) has objectively "made it" in the big city, with a
successful career in programming. But it's clear her life in the Big Apple
has a worm inside it, one that eats its way from the core to the surface
when she returns from a trip back home to the life she's proudly built, but
which she now begins to question.
A conventional American indie drama would focus on the two weeks Girlie
spent upon returning to Oklahoma. You know, the formerly Sundance now
Lifetime movie cliché of the protagonist who returns to their hick town from
the big city and realises how false their life is once they're exposed to
some good old rural folksiness. It's clear something pivotal happened to
Girlie on her return home, but we don't learn exactly what until the film's
closing minutes, and it's not the rugged wisdom of some handsome cowboy that
opens her eyes, but the jaded patter of that renowned sage of the western
world, the New York cabbie.
After a lifetime as a cabbie, Clark (Sean Penn) knows how to read
people. When Girlie gets into his cab he spots something in her eyes that
makes her stand out. More than just Johnson's Tippi Hedren/Melanie
Griffith-inherited looks, which he clearly appreciates. Clark sees a sad,
contemplative look in her eyes, which he seizes on. He begins with the sort
of generic cabbie talk that bores millions of passengers on a daily basis,
but there's a manipulative slant to his talk that tells you this is a man
who knows how to break through people's defences, especially women. "You
were expecting Vinny," he jokes when he reveals his name, a gentle dig at
any class consciousness his well-dressed passenger might have. "It's nice
that you're not on your phone," he remarks, a subtle way for a middle-aged
man to make a young woman self-conscious and thus more engaged in his
banter.
But Girlie is indeed on her phone, which she keeps out of view of her nosy
ferryman. She's texting with some anonymous lover, listed only as "L" in her
phone. L doesn't waste much time with "How was your flight?" pleasantries
before he starts asking for nudes. Girlie groans and rolls her eyes before
putting her phone away in her purse. If this is all the man she loves has to
offer, maybe shooting the shit with a cabbie isn't such a bad
alternative.
Daddio requires a degree of suspension of disbelief to accept
that two Americans in 2024 would have the sort of conversation that develops
over the course of the film. Most women in Girlie's situation would refuse
to indulge Clark's need for chit chat. "I've had a long flight so I'd rather
not talk," would likely be the full extent of her contribution. The average
American woman certainly wouldn't allow the conversation to take the
sexually suggestive turn Clark steers it towards, or put up with his prying
and later jabbing regarding what happened on Girlie's trip to Oklahoma. If
you were unaware of the film's premise, after 10 minutes you might begin to
suspect Penn's Clark is a serial killer and Girlie his latest potential
victim. But the fact that Girlie doesn't text a friend Clark's cab number
suggests she's so lonely that she'll indulge any conversation, and she's
well able to go toe to toe with Clark when it comes to suggestive innuendo,
or as he puts it, she can "handle" herself.
Regardless of whether you can buy into a conversation like this occurring
among two Americans of opposite genders in the current climate, Johnson and
Penn sell the shit out of it. It's easy to frown at movies that favour
dialogue over visuals, but when the actors in question are as magnetic as
Johnson and Penn you quickly forget you're watching what might be dismissed
as simply a "filmed play." Such a dismissal relies on ignoring how well Hall
and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael highlight the faces of these two performers.
Essentially made up of close-ups, the film forces us to look at Johnson
and Penn in a way we've never really had the chance to in their respective
filmographies. Papamichael's artificial recreations of streetlights and
neon gives Johnson the aura of a millennial Greta Garbo evaluating her
position in that famous close-up at the end of Queen Christina, forcing us
to gaze at one of the world's most famous women for so long that the
dividing window between idol and audience becomes uncomfortably
transparent. As beams of light wind their way through the nooks and
crannies of Penn's weathered fizzog, he takes on the appearance of a
passage grave during solstice.
In staring at these two faces for 90 minutes we realise what it is that
makes a movie star, that combination of being larger than life and yet
recognisably human, and how rarely modern American movies exploit their
stars in such a way. Hall doesn't simply use her dialogue to dole out plot
points, with much of the storytelling coming from her actors' faces, their
expressions often contradicting their words. It's a shame
Daddio is headed straight for the home in the UK and Ireland
as despite the intimacy of its premise, it's as cinematic as anything
Hollywood will blast onto an IMAX screen this year.
Daddio is on Sky Cinema from
August 17th.
