Before even going into Daddio, the premise is already a hard sell. It’s just Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn talking for roughly one hour and forty minutes (or one hour, thirty-three if you exclude the credits). And yet, the script, written by Christy Hall, managed to make its way onto the Black List in 2017. Unsurprisingly, it was originally intended as a stage play, hence the minimalism and dialogue-heavy nature of it. But, being that a play usually has to be slightly more “bulletproof” with its dialogue, it’s a bit of a shock to see that the content of Daddio is so undeniably cringe. Not, as Hall, Johnson and Penn seemed to be hoping, “edgy” and “no holds barred.” In this case, some holds definitely ought to have been barred, starting with the unsavory gender cliches that both Johnson’s character, whose name is never revealed, and Clark, the driver played by Penn, embody.
Perhaps just as vexing is that one keeps waiting (and hoping) for some theoretically inevitable twist that finds “Girlie” (this is how Johnson is referred to in the credits) upending everything that Clark thought he knew about life and women (and contempt for modern conveniences). Sort of the way Steve Buscemi’s 2007 film, Interview, did. In a similar fashion to Daddio, Interview also relies solely on the dialogue between a man and a woman of very different stature and in very different places in their lives, while also leaning mostly on one location: Katya’s (Sienna Miller) loft in Manhattan. The film was a remake of Theo van Gogh’s (yes, Vincent is his great-granduncle) 2003 movie of the same name, with Buscemi directing and starring in it, in addition co-writing the script with David Schechter. Like “Girlie” and Clark, Katya and Pierre (Buscemi) play what amounts to a game of verbal cat and mouse, with each person one-upping the other on “emotional sluttiness” as the movie unfolds.
Hall likely thought that the context of a cab ride remains a totally plausible milieu in which someone might get overly confessional with a stranger. Even though, more than ever, no one wants to talk to their driver, least of all a female passenger forced to engage with a male “ferrier.” But, in having “Girlie” opt to take a yellow cab instead of using an app to call an Uber or a Lyft, etc., Hall seems to want to leave the impression that this woman is an “old soul.” Therefore, also willing to talk to an “old man” like Clark instead of totally disappearing into her phone. In fact, one of the first things Clark says to her is, “It’s nice you’re not on your phone. You don’t have to keep talking to me or nothing, but, just…nice. You, know? To see a human, not plugged in.” Here, it’s worth noting that a great many people do still relish the small talk interactions of the cab ride, along with small talk in other service-centric environments as well. Indeed, some are appalled at the idea that “quiet mode” a.k.a. “quiet ride” could even exist. That it only serves to make us all more isolated from one another and, consequently, even lonelier and more depressed. But then one looks to what a conversation between “Girlie” and Clark is like, and it’s enough to kill off all romanticism about the need for “interacting” with strangers.
Something that “Girlie” appears rather deft at as she gives an obsequious laugh to Clark’s comment about her being off her phone and asks, “What’s your name?” When he tells her what it is, he doesn’t feel at all inclined to do the “human” thing and ask her what her own name is in response. Therefore, the namelessness of “Girlie,” despite the numerous opportunities presented where he could have asked for it, is one of many things about Daddio that makes it so inherently sexist. That a woman created the product, as usual, has nothing to do with the fact that it is a misogynistic one. Indeed, throughout the movie, rather than being repulsed by the type of man Clark is, “Girlie” only encourages him with her “coy looks” and reinforcing giggles.
Clark’s overt chauvinism begins around the ten-minute mark of Daddio, when he tells “Girlie” that her “little outfit” gave her away in terms of being someone who actually lives in New York rather than someone who’s just visiting. Instead of being grossed out by that description, she titters and repeats, “My little outfit?” Clark then proceeds to rattle off the reasons why her outfit represents, ultimately, that she can “handle herself,” the supposed true mark of being a New Yorker (who can often never “handle themselves” anywhere else). For those wondering, at this point in the “narrative,” how the fuck it’s going to manage to drag on for a full movie-length amount of time, Hall presents the convenient obstacle of a standstill traffic jam around the twenty-one-minute mark. A.k.a. the proverbial “end of act one.” At which time, it starts to become clear that even 2004’s Taxi has more value when it comes to romanticizing cab rides.
With act two, Clark’s freak flag flies unchecked as he has the audacity to turn around (as “Girlie” is engaged in another gross text exchange with the older married man she’s having an affair with), slide open the partition and ask her, “Did you like getting tied up?” This in reference to a story she just told about her much older sister tying her up by her hands and legs and putting her in the empty bathtub when she was a kid. A means to teach her how to “escape” if she was ever kidnapped. Obviously, Clark is more turned on by than “sympathetic” to the story. Rather than shutting him down at this point, as she should have long ago, “Girlie” continues to invite Clark’s skeevy rhetoric by justifying the question with the answer, “I liked the challenge of getting free.”
After enduring Clark’s “shrink bit” for a while though, there does come a point when “Girlie” finally has the presence of mind to say, “Go fuck yourself”—and it certainly took her long enough. Unfortunately, she opens the door, so to speak, to him again after he “apologizes” by saying, “I just like to push buttons.” Sounds like something his first wife, Madonna, might wield as an excuse. And yes, there’s a missed opportunity for playing one of her songs in the cab when Clark asks if “Girlie” wants to listen to the radio. To keep some aspect of the ride “quiet,” she opts to say no. And it goes without saying that there wasn’t enough money in the budget for “Papa Don’t Preach” (the lead single from the album Madonna actually dedicated to Penn, True Blue) to blast from the speakers—which, for “Girlie,” would have been far more emotionally soothing than indulging Clark for this fucking long. Or even the married man she keeps texting with, often revealing facial expressions that indicate how “icky” she feels at certain moments throughout the “conversation,” not least of which is when the married guy, saved in her phone as “L,” keeps insisting that he “needs her pink.” Needs her to get him off, etc., etc. Alas, she’s already busy getting Clark off on an emotional level in the cab.
The car doesn’t start moving again until around the fifty-four-minute mark, which means thirty-three minutes have gone by wherein these two are as stationary as the plot and dialogue itself, the latter always dancing around the trope of “Girlie’s” “Daddy issues,” hence the reason why she’s with an older man who’s already taken. And yes, “Girlie” does get into it with Clark about her absentee father, and the fact that he never actually touched her as a child (you know, in the affectionate way, not the molester way).
Far earlier than this point, a reasonable viewer might ask themselves: are there times when one is feeling this chatty with their driver? Apart from when one is a rich woman with a regular chauffeur? Sure, but this goes well-beyond the “TMI” level of believability. Granted, when straight women are in an especially vulnerable state, particularly over a dude, it’s not out of the realm of possibility for her to become confessional with another man—ideally, an “objective” stranger. Alas, the grotesqueness of their conversation would seemingly require a certain amount of drunkenness to be at play. Not least of which is the almost Woody Allen-meets-Jean-Luc Godard-esque exchange during which “Girlie” says to Clark, “If I told you that I was twenty-four or thirty-four, your opinion of me would drastically change.” He replies, “That’s not true.” She rebuffs, “For women, it is true. It is fuckin’ true. The moment we hit thirty, our value is cut in half.” Clark shrugs, “I mean, fine. Fuck it, it’s true.” He then “comforts” her by adding, “You really do look twenty-something, but by the way you talk all smart and shit, you know, if I wasn’t lookin’ I would guess you were fifty.” (Side note: Dakota Johnson is thirty-four.)
Through all this supposed repartee (again, by more twentieth century standards of what would constitute that), a tension seems to keep building, but there is never any real release. Never any grand denouement that would make it worthwhile enough to, as a viewer, endure this very long cab ride. Not even the “revelatory” final piece of information that “Girlie” metes out to Clark.
Worse still, “Girlie” is so “touched” by Clark’s toxic masculinity-based candor that she tips him five hundred dollars at the end of the ride. Of course, an Uber would have been much cheaper in every way, not to mention the prior-to-booking offer it gives to have a “quiet ride” and not deal with any chatty bullshit from fundamentally lonely men like Clark, a driver who, in the end, doesn’t make anyone feel all that nostalgic about the slow death of the yellow cab.
