Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative. However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, though better options may be on the horizon. (Note: Anything in bold blue [some may look near purple] is a link to something more in the review.)
My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”
(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song’s name)
8/8/2024, 5pm: Last week while reviewing Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass), I said I might be late with posting this week because of a couple of scheduled medical procedures dealing with my kidney stones, but early this morning I was able to post this review, after all (more lovely sleep awaits), now I’m just late in announcing it (IMDb, Facebook, LinkenIn, Letterboxd) while celebrating no bladder cancer and the breaking up of a troublesome stone. (A tip for you: go easy on spinach and calcium.)
Daddio (Christy Hall) rated R 101 min.
Here’s the trailer:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size;
activate the same button or use “esc” keyboard key to return to normal.)
If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy). To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
What Happens: While there are a few other characters seen briefly on screen identified in the final credits, this is a story with only 2 people interacting for a little over 1½ hours: (1) “Girlie” (Dakota Johnson)—marginally referred to as such during the film, no other name given, which may seem patronizing but was a clearly a choice by director/screenwriter Hall—a computer programmer just back in NYC from a 2-week visit with her somewhat-estranged older half-sister in Oklahoma (where they both grew up in a nowhere small town; now she’s 9 years in NYC), on a cab ride from JFK International Airport in Queens to her apartment (on 44th St. between 9th and 10th Avenues in Manhattan), talking with the cabbie most of the way while also receiving lusty texts from her lover, an unnamed married man; and (2) Clark (Sean Penn)—who’d rather be named Vinnie or Mikey (he grew up the Hell’s Kitchen area of Manhattan, now lives in Jackson Heights, Queens [not that far from Flushing, where I was back in the early 1970s; Jackson Heights is pretty rough, too, or at least it was when I lived in that borough])—the cabbie, notably older than Girlie—who’s full of life-advice to share with her (whether she wants it or not), which she begins to warm up to as the night goes on. For anyone familiar with NYC (like me) the route they take is well-known—Van Wyck Expressway from the airport to the Long Island Expressway, then west into Manhattan, through a tunnel into the heart of the city. At first, he’s the more active talker, noting she’s his last fare of the night, then rambles—with a good bit of regular profanity—about how he’s tired, also tired of people paying with credit cards so they leave him no tip, plus he’s angry about self-driving cars and rideshares cutting into his business, but also digresses on how tea, coffee, salt are among the things various societies have used as money in the past. He also compliments her for not getting buried in her phone (although she does use it a bit at various times later) nor does she need to listen to the radio, so she can be aware of whatever he’s talking about, which does have some mild interest for her as he yaps.
They begin to engage in conversation when they switch from talking about computer programming as being ultimately about 0s and 1s to situations in life being false or true, which leads them into revealing aspects of their lives to each other as he shares about his ex-wife, finds out easily enough about her married-man affair when she reveals a bit about the bawdy texts that guy’s sending to her wanting porno photos (at a later point she does send an old one of her naked breasts, in reply to his photo of an erect penis [his, I assume]). Due to a traffic stoppage from a bad accident they have a good bit of time to talk (I’m not sure how long it would take to get from JFK to midtown at night without a delay, but it was useful to have some reason to pad out the story’s running time, as well as give them an opportunity to have a good bit of face-to-face dialogue rather than always over his shoulder). Clark tells her never to say “love” to this guy because all he wants her for is sex, talks about how his ex met his desire of a pig in bed but then she gained weight, leading to mutual disinterest as he had an affair with a 19-year-old. ⇒She admits her lover’s an older man, she’s called him “Daddy,” probably in response to the near-useless relationship she had with her own father (but at least he never molested her; Mom was even more useless) whom she left when she was 6 to live with her 17-year-old sister, with Dad giving her a handshake as she left—although she later says her sister totally discounted that memory during the recent visit. Clark admits he’d like to go to Japan, she admits she’d like to be a birdwatcher in Central Park, then go to Greece to dive off a cliff into the ocean; she further reveals that when she went to OK she was pregnant but miscarried while there (a relief), then joined her sister and Sis’ Native American lover in a rain dance which Girlie hoped would just wash away much of her life (all of this revelation leads to her winning the spontaneous “confession” contest with Clark). They soon arrive at her address but she has no cash, has to pay with a card (boo!). They part, he shakes hands with her; however, there’s no hugging.⇐
So What? Director Hall, who also provides the screenplay, originally wrote this story as a theatrical piece—at least that’s how some understand it in evaluations that I've read, but in the press notes she says it was always intended as a film but one that was developed like a play (she also says what you'll find just below about her inspiration for this film*)—so if it feels like something that was adapted from the stage, it almost could have been. Even the filming was largely as claustrophobic as how the images appear on screen—with lots of tight closeups, Girlie looking pretty serious in most of them—as the “cab” was a vehicle on a soundstage with images of the city surroundings projected on screens behind that main prop to give the illusion of the cab moving along (a few actual shots of the environment were also made in NYC and Jersey City, NJ) into their night.
*“When I moved to New York many years later, I was subsequently fascinated by the relationship between the cabbie and the passenger — it’s so special and distinctive to the city. When you hop into a medallion cab, there’s something very specific about that experience, and it’s become very different with ride-sharing apps. In a medallion cab, a lot of the drivers are talkers, and they’re curious about the world, curious about people, and they create a kind of confessional on wheels; you might end up bearing your souls to them. I was glad that when I finally moved to New York and started taking cabs, that thing about a cab ride was still very true in New York. In a lot of ways, DADDIO is my love letter to that experience. And I wanted it to be funny, I wanted it to be entertaining. I wanted [it] to have laugh-out-loud moments. [¶] I always thought of [it] as a movie.”
This tactic of surrounding the actors with environmentally-enhancing-projections was a tactic in classic Hollywood movies to give the illusion of a stagecoach rumbling through a western landscape or cops patrolling city streets as the actors were photographed against the images projected from behind on a rear-screen so the final result looked like a continuous action of the objects in motion.**
**Although the action can also be constrained, as in Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) where finally-awake (but hungover) Jed Leland (Joseph Cotton) walks out of his office into the darkened newsroom of the Chicago Daily Inquirer to find newspaper owner Charlie Kane (Welles) finishing Leland’s negative review of Kane’s wife, Susan Alexander Kane’s (Dorothy Comingore), miserable opera debut. Welles is in the foreground typing, Leland walks up to him where they have a brief exchange before Leland’s fired. Leland and his background are all on rear-screen projection (including his dialogue)—or maybe 2 separate pieces of film were joined in an optical printer to give that effect (I’ve seen both explanations)—so the synchronization of what he says to Charlie and what Kane replies had to be carefully timed when it was shot. All of this was done to allow the scene to continue the famous deep-focus, depth-of-field imagery along with the low-key lighting that was more possible to do when the actors were close to the camera in a tight framing (as the scene shows Kane, Leland, and Bernstein {Everett Sloane} before Charlie decides he'll finish the rejection-review).
Ironically, another well-celebrated cinematic scene occurs in On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954) where brothers Charlie (Rod Steiger) and Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) have a great dialogue-encounter about Terry's need to abide by the mob's directives, enhanced by rear-projection—or, rather, the lack of it—because the projection device malfunctioned during this shoot so the decision was made to close the blinds in the back of the cab, making their intense confrontation even more tightly-claustrophobic. Another noted aspect of this scene was that it was not filmed all at once, with first the 2-shots of the brothers then the various closeups, but they were done on different days because both actors weren’t available at the same time, so each one was shot separately, talking to an empty seat, demonstrating how superb these guys were as you couldn’t tell both weren’t always in the cab together, unlike in Daddio where it seems Johnson and Penn are always sharing their cab.
Of course what ultimately matters in a film that is structured to appear to be taking place in real time in what’s (mostly) a confined location is the performance virtuosity by the 2 leads or you’d probably be ready to turn it off after the first ½ hour, in streaming of course, but would you walk out of a theater? (Especially if you didn’t care for the abrasive aspects of Clark’s character when he’s yapping away early on with Girlie having little to say at that point). For me, there was no question that I’d keep going with this ride to see how it evolves because Clark’s got some good insights along with his blather, plus Girlie implies early on she’s got a lot of depth too so I wanted to know more about her. Both of these polished actors bring their “A game” to their roles, keeping us fascinated by what they have to offer to each other (and us) in this extended-conversational experience. For me at least, there’s no clear explanation of this film’s title although it clearly has allusions both to Girlie’s father-confusions and Clark’s old-enough-to-see-himself-as-an-on-the-spot mentor, giving what he considers to be essential wisdom to his chance-passenger, in more of a parental-advice mode than any implication of “drop this guy, choose me” on his part. Further, this moniker has sort of a 1950s-early ‘60s vibe, as in Beatnik slang, which also seems to fit Clark’s self-image even if those influences are far removed from the present-time setting of this story. I’d say this bit of title-vagueness adds to the situation presented of people spontaneously thrown together who choose to engage with each other rather than silently move through the city under the quiet cover of darkness.
(Not a great photo here, but at least it's an alternative to those frequent tight shots in the cab.)
Bottom Line Final Comments: Daddio was released in 628 domestic (U.S.-Canada) theaters on June 28, 2024, was still in a mere 11 of them as of last week (odds are, probably nowhere close to you—or me), making only $930.4 thousand at the box-office to date ($983.3 globally), which is a shame given how good it is, so if you’re interested in seeing it your best bet is likely via streaming where you can rent it for $19.99 from Apple TV+ (a bit pricey, but you’d easily pay that much for a couple of theater tickets so keep that in mind), where it’s been since July 30, 2024. Overall, the CCAL’s not as enthused about promoting Daddio as me, with the Rotten Tomatoes positive reviews at 77%, the Metacritic average score at a marginally-supportive 62%, so let’s see what some other voices have to say about it. Sheila O'Mally at RogerEbert.com likes what she's found: “Dialogue can lie, but faces tell the truth. Stories are told through faces. It takes enormous trust on the part of a director to allow this to happen, to let the faces do most of the heavy lifting. ‘Daddio’, written and directed by Christy Hall, is a film about faces, and this is pretty extraordinary considering it's a two-character film with wall-to-wall dialogue. Dakota Johnson's and Sean Penn's faces fill the screen, shot in extreme close-up--just the eyes sometimes, the smiles, the thoughts happening behind the eyes. Hall's dialogue compels you to listen, to lean in, but Johnson and Penn draw us into their separate worlds and histories, each face telling a million stories.” Yes!
But, you can’t please all of the people all of the time, including Jeannette Catsoulis of The New York Times: “Handicapped by more than a terrible title, Christy Hall’s ‘Daddio,’ set almost entirely inside a New York City taxicab, tries too hard and lasts too long. A synthetic encounter between a gabby cabby and his self-possessed female passenger, the movie is a claustrophobic two-hander oxygenated in part by Phedon Papamichael’s sleekly gorgeous cinematography. [¶ The star power of its leads, Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson, doesn’t hurt either. Injecting nuance and emotional depth into Hall’s uninspired script, the two turn a threatened slog into a mildly enjoyable journey. [¶] I did, though, appreciate Hall’s choice to flash some texts directly onto the movie screen: Squinting at characters’ smartphones is one of my least favorite activities. Along with listening to gossipy cabdrivers.” Nevertheless, I think you’d find this “gossipy cabdriver” to be worth listening to (most of the time, at least) along with Girlie’s decision to verbally meet him on his own terms, as she’s clearly pondering whether his advice about her love life is worth putting into practice. Although, as I’ve said enough about this uniquely-fascinating experience for now, which is probably more effective when seen than read about, I’ll leave you with my usual wrap-up tactic of a Musical Metaphor, although in this case I wasn’t being very successful about coming up with anything useful until my insightful wife, Nina, suggested I simply look at songs with some version of “Daddio” in the title, which did yield some options with the one that I like best being “Daddy O” by San Francisco’s Frances England (on her 2020 Honey EP) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5mXlsJ2r0M (she also has a slightly different version on her 2006 debut album Fascinating Creatures, that she performs live for you here), which I think can easily serve musically/visually as a metaphor for how Girlie would like to remember her own Dad, even though it’s just a dream for her, one that she’s trying to turn into a reality with that married, lustly-texting lover, a probable-failed-attempt if she’s willing to listen to Clark.
SHORT TAKES
Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:
Options: (1) What's new on Netflix in August 2024; (2) What's new on Amazon Prime Video in August 2024; (3) What's new on Max in August 2024; (4) What's new on Disney+ in August 2024; (5) What's new on Hulu in August 2024; (6) IMDb staff picks for the best things to watch in August 2024; (7) An account of a guy who watched 73 minutes of cat videos in a theater.
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