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Like bartenders and baristas, cab drivers can hypothetically double as therapists — service workers who lend an ear for listening and a shoulder for crying. Keep the meter running long enough, and maybe you’ll unburden yourself straight into a breakthrough. At least, the movies’ romantic version of an old-fashioned taxi hack might be like that. You may get an Uber and/or a Lyft driver who’s dying to hear all about your life, but they’re more likely to be just another gig-economy worker trying to get through the day. Assuming, of course, they’re not an actual licensed therapist behind the ride-app wheel, moonlighting to make ends meet.
Daddio relies on that myth of the checkered-cab driver as outer-borough sage and surrogate analyst, however, in a way that feels both quaint and more than a little disquieting. First, you have to believe that, given the perfect storm of circumstances — a ride from JFK airport into midtown Manhattan that’s suddenly, conveniently prolonged by traffic — would, in the year of our lord 2024, allow a young woman in her late twenties to engage in a spiky chat with a sixtysomething driver that turns into a battle of the sexes. Stranger things have happened, certainly. But the premise does require a leap of faith from the jump. And even if you do buy into the conceit behind this feature-length bottle episode, writer-director Christy Hall has the uphill battle of convincing you that such creatures still roam the Earth, offering counsel in moving confessional booths. You half expect the guy on the other side of the window to ask if his passenger caught the Brooklyn Dodgers game or whether she’s had the hot dogs at Coney Island. That’s the “quaint” part.
The “disquieting” part comes via the casting, and here’s where Daddio succeeds in at least making this two-hander way, way more interesting than it ought to be. Dakota Johnson is the woman who gets in the back seat — she’s merely listed as “Girlie” in the credits, which, okay, sure — and is headed back to her place on 44th St, between 9th and 10th. Sean Penn is Clark, the guy in the driver seat who hails from Queens and clocks that his fare isn’t a tourist, since she gave him cross streets instead of an address.
He’s a little flirty, a lot of flinty, a pair of eyes in the rearview mirror who’s making small talk as they wind their way toward midtown. As for Girlie, she’s appropriately wary but also shockingly forthcoming, and not opposed to bantering with the older guy with the Cardinal Richelieu facial hair. She’ll entertain his rants about how no one uses paper money anymore and the way everyone just uploads all their info to that big digital cloud in the sky. “One day that cloud is gonna open up and pour acid rain down all over our dumb faces,” Clark claims. It’s not exactly “a real rain will come and wash all of the scum off the streets,” but listen, you can’t have everything.
Meanwhile, Girlie’s phone is blowing up with texts from the single most needy, horny man in the greater tri-state area, who vacillates between inquiring about her trip and demanding she help him finish ASAP, never mind that he’s in a bar and she’s in the back of a cab on the interstate. Clark picks up on the fact that these missives are clearly bothering his passenger. He also seems to intuitively sense that a) the man is older, b) Girlie is not his wife and c) there are more than a few father issues involved. Soon, curiosity leads to a deeper conversation about what men and women want, why they want it, how sex plays into everything, why she’ll never get what she wants out of this guy, her past, his past, etc.
Social niceties seem to have excused themselves from the ride at this point. Ditto boundaries. The idea is somehow that, loitering on the 495 while police clear away a car accident, a whole lot of truth bombs and F-bombs can now be properly dropped. The question is not whether pretenses of politeness will be dropped in the name of getting “real.” It’s more like: What if Taxi Driver was one part gender-studies course and three parts therapy session? There’s a word for these particular types of exchanges, whether you see them onstage or occasionally onscreen, and that’s “horseshit.” It’s tough to shake the feeling that you are watching human mouthpieces lob rhetorical talking points in the name of achieving some sort of profound insight and, more often than not, failing to hit their targets.
What complicates things here are the actors — specifically, the fact that you can’t stand listening to them being forced to say these lines and yet you can’t look away from what they’re both doing while stuck in that confined cinematic space. Johnson’s career has been unfairly reduced to one long eye-roll supercut, when in fact she’s an extraordinarily gifted performer capable of more than communicating millennial ennui or channeling someone’s idea of capital-S Sexiness. She’s bringing an intriguing undercurrent of vulnerability and uncertainty to her regrettably named character, who seems genuinely unsure about this unbalanced romantic relationship she’s navigating. You’re watching someone playing someone who’s playing at being jaded, but isn’t. It’s a performance of defenses constantly being lowered and raised.
Her rapport with Penn, who’s unsurprisingly the main reason to suffer Daddio‘s litany of recycled Mars v. Venus differences between the sexes, is enough to keep some of the more questionable back-and-forths from turning into outright howlers. And the idea of him playing this probably paternal, possibly predatory philosopher of the road is the one inspired thing that pays off. Between this and the recently released Alphabet City, Penn is carving out a nice late-career niche as an NYC nightdweller, and the way he gives Clark a genuine working-class charm and cockeyed kindness — but laced with just enough danger to make you wonder if some of those sub-Neanderthal opinions aren’t threats in disguise — lends a whole other dimension to this long, dark airport-commute of the soul. Watching the actor work remains a wonderful, if increasingly rare pleasure. You just have to pay quite a hefty toll to do it with this endurance test.
