DADDIO (2023)

Christy Hall’s two-hander directorial debut, Daddio, reaches for the poetic grace that once animated the theatre pictures of Louis Malle and Robert Altman 30 and 40 years ago. Though in the end it’s not quite up there with My Dinner with Andre (1981), Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), or Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), we revel in its suggestive aroma anyway.

The conceit isn’t anything novel: after landing at JFK, on her way up the 678 and then off to the 495 for Midtown, Girlie (Dakota Johnson) starts chatting with her cabbie (Sean Penn), and slowly but surely, like in a psychoanalysis session, she pours her deepest secrets out from her gut like she’d never have with friends and family. It might not sound like much, but the two leads’ charms stay with you, and their dynamic keeps turning corners you didn’t know were there, and before long you may find yourself forgetting your initial scepticism towards the minimalist premise.

Playing Christy’s self-insertion, Dakota Johnson (Cha Cha Real Smooth) is at her most sensually sensitive and emotionally layered. At 34, she may not be bringing to her character the same richness and vulnerability that Julianne Moore or Sissy Spacek did at a similar age—she doesn’t entirely give herself over to the camera—but she has the sureness in her screen presence to suggest that she’s capable of much more. As Girlie the blondie, her radiance is warm and musky. When she speaks and gestures, she’s in the air—afloat, airborne. Even in press interviews, you feel soothed by her velvety timbre. Yet her goody-two-shoes breeziness isn’t soft and sultry like Marlene Dietrich. Returning from a visit to her sister in their Oklahoma hometown, Girlie’s self-control doesn’t translate into the sneering aloofness of the classic femme fatales. The cabbie tries to elicit a conversation and doesn’t draw a blank. “You can handle yourself,” he says, deducing from her confidence with a vulgar old-shoe like him.

As Clark, Sean Penn, with his friendly-neighbourhood tenor we’ve come to expect of old-school city cabbies rotting in their front seats, emanates in his breaths the smell of garlic and tobacco. Emerging onto the scene some four decades ago with Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Penn is one of those New Hollywood method actors who prided themselves on their masculinity. In Daddio, he taps his fingers on the wheel and plays the tunes in his head, then seconds later he’s off rambling about getting screwed over by the apps and running on empty with his veteran life as a taxi driver. Girlie wasn’t that put off by him. For her, his vulgar mannerisms and gravelly voice are what’s enticing her, but she draws a line, too. (Apparently, she has a pet peeve about men around her using the word “panties”.)

Daddio isn’t feminist in the traditional sense. It’s not only contemplating passive misogyny and a woman’s unease towards masculine crudeness, but also her confusion over her temptations by these men who sexualize or try to get close to her. Christy Hall has reached down into her feelings, unresolved and self-contradictory as they may be, and projected them onto Girlie (she even has her born a blonde Oklahoman like herself). With Dakota’s character as the angle through which she examines her sexual and physical opposites, Christy tries treating them with the respect she has for herself and looking at them in the way they actually are—whatever’s behind their gregarious swagger. She cherishes knowing them, relating to them as fellow persons, rather than a contact in your social media.

As it generally goes in wars of the sexes, the process of forming mutual respect with your rival is one of gradually letting down your guard, piece by piece, quid pro quo. As is clear from the outset, both characters are troubled by their dissatisfactions in their relationships, and wouldn’t you know it, they’re perfect for each other: the young Girlie’s trapped in a problematic relationship with a married man by her own Oedipus complex, and the older Clark needs Platonic satisfaction over having been of use for Girlie. So dating philosophies were thrown around, and personal secrets were exchanged, and in between the lines you detect their insecurities before they’re revealed for you: Clark has a sarcastic routine about being a “Clark” or a “Vinny”, and Girlie finds the Boolean certainty of computer science reassuring, and so on. And they let you in on it, too. The film gradually builds up the momentum for the emotional discharge at the end, so when it comes it not only isn’t mawkish enough to cloy you, but it surprises you and chokes you up in a way that you couldn’t have predicted, especially with how primal Girlie’s exploration of her traumas went.

This film works by behavioural cues and visual reflections: a work of suggestions. It’s very attentive to the characters’ mannerisms, behaviours, fears, and sexual undercurrents, as well as the evolving landscape outside the window—from the Jamaica Train Yard and the highways through the underwater vehicular tunnels to the skyscrapers and the narrow streets—that the effect reminds you of Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) and David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996). But its execution is only just up to scratch, which shouldn’t distress the filmmakers since, as works of novices go, it’s not without effort or show of promise. Though mostly shot in a soundstage (or the Volume Stage, famously put to use for The Mandalorian), you can feel the environment shaking, bumping around you as if in a real cab; you’d be forgiven for thinking it was shot on location.

We’re not shown much of the New York City they travelled through, but the film doesn’t need to. To me, NYC is an idea, a feeling of sorts that sticks with you, even when you’ve only seen it from a limited angle. And it’s all there here: the vapours, the trash, the listlessness underneath the vitality, the sensuality, the parlance. But the way that the landscape shots were edited, they don’t linger long enough to reflect the emotions of the spectators. The intermittent ambient music is monotonous and bland, though the general idea of it is faultless: ambience evokes moods in ways without calling attention to itself. It often comes in at the wrong time, and distracts you from settling into these characters’ mental states, despite how much it over-dramatizes them.

As a New York playwright (of all the New York playwrights!), Christy envisioned Daddio as a movie from the moment it was first conceived, yet the screenplay was written in the format of the stage. Having only worked on and off Broadway, she wasn’t ready to change gears, but the material could not be more ill-suited for the stage. Circulated around and famously charted the Black List in 2017, it didn’t take off as a project until it came to the attention of Dakota Johnson, who then shared it with Sean Penn.

Celine Song, the latest example of a playwright-turned-movie-director who caught the world’s attention with her peerlessly elegant and personal Past Lives (2023), is said to have fallen “so hard in love with filmmaking” that she has no plans for going back, and it’s not hard to imagine why. As a medium, theatre doesn’t leave as much room for visual invention and movement as film. If not impossible, it undoubtedly takes some inhuman mental gymnastics to figure out a way of fully simulating on stage the enclosed, four-dimensional world of a moving cab’s interiors. The in-the-shoes subjectivity and the paradox between claustrophobia and expansive field of view, as well as privacy and intimacy, seem only palpable within the darkness of the multiplex. Unless you reel it off as a burlesque, you can’t take the stage with you when you travel on four wheels.

Likewise, you rarely see on stage the kind of sound experimentation done in movies that are already in the history books. Things like Marlon Brando’s inarticulate parlance in On the Waterfront (1954) and the cacophonous dialogues of Robert Altman don’t usually fly well as a main feature. In live theatre, as Christy said in an interview, “you don’t have a lot to hide behind. You live or die by your character development and your dialogue.” The line deliveries are crisp and clear almost by necessity. There are, of course, experimental tendencies—the post-dramatic school, the physical school, the improvisational school, and so forth—but none of them goes as far as what you can do with the freedom of the camera frame.

On the other hand, precisely because of this constraint, theatre plays are often richer in character and story than movies, since they’re all that’s really going for them for the most part. Working so close to the human centre, artists coming from theatrical backgrounds—from Orson Welles to Martin McDonagh—often have a much readier grip on dramaturgy and characterization than film school kids who dream up visual tricks and use them for parodies.

But transitioning is not all well and good as job-hopping. The naturalism of the plays is closer to TV soap than the stripped-down, undramatized realism we see in realist cinema. The illusion of authenticity is there, but unlike for instance the films of Kelly Reichardt, it feels lab-grown, leaving signs of having been processed and designed. Theatregoers may detect the shrouded theatricality from the manner and rhythm in the line readings, as well as the sentence structures and the grammar: not many people in real life are that quick on the uptake in fleshing out their thoughts and translating them into spoken language, and the vocabulary used is often much simpler than what you would be led to believe from having been only exposed to the prestige social dramas of Amy Herzog (Mary Jane) or Aaron Sorkin (To Kill a Mockingbird). In Daddio, as in Past Lives and Fresh Kills (2023), the two leads’ emotional subtext was astute and mellow in the literal way that may remind moviegoers of the Old Hollywood melodramas: all the poetry is in the images and the landscape, sometimes also in the behavioural details, but not in how they talked.

That isn’t always the case, of course. In Vanya on 42nd Street, the actors, having been at it for three years by the time of shooting, were able to play up so much within the framework of a rehearsal: they’re so familiar with each other’s stage presence and every line in David Mamet’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, written and directed by Andre Gregory, that they feel at home to improvise their way out of the psychodrama. When Julianne Moore delivered one of her lines with a hint of irony and burst into awkward laughter along with Brooke Smith right next to her, their dissociation from the melodrama that was supposed to take hold not only gives the dramatic tension a break, a breath of fresh air, but also paradoxically makes everyone more settled down into character.

Every bit of sentimentality conveys so much emotional truth, and you are swept away even as you are aware of its theatricality and the backstage. That was one of several spontaneous laughs during the entire runtime, all of which are unmistakably the ones you would expect to see in rehearsals, yet none of them took the dramatic tension away: the performers channelled into the material their authenticity as themselves, and they infused into the serious pessimism—almost nihilism—of the material a joyful good-heartedness; it only adds to their emotional resilience. What Daddio needed for its characters to really become alive was precisely this rehearsed effect. At times, such as when Clark was making fun of his name, the movie seemed to have gone near it. On its own terms, though, it’s already a small triumph.

Daddio should be seen with the lights out.

USA | 2024 | 101 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Christy Hall.
starring: Dakota Johnson & Sean Penn.