Movies taking place in cars are part of a subgenre of single-set filmmaking that’s tricky to find, but usually pretty good. Steven Spielberg cut his teeth on Duel, in which a traveling salesman is chased by the homicidal driver of a semi truck. Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock have to keep a bus careening down a Los Angeles highway in Speed. Tom Hardy takes the most riveting phone calls about pouring concrete you’ve ever seen while driving from Birmingham to London in Locke. The latest entry into this genre, Christy Hall’s taxi-set directorial debut Daddio, stars Dakota Johnson, Sean Penn, and the Manhattan skyline in a slice-of-life drama about what two strangers could possibly talk about on a 90-minute car ride.
A young woman (Johnson), clad in platform Docs, a bucket bag, and a platinum-blonde bob, exits JFK Airport late at night and (apparently skipping the loud, long taxi line) hops into a waiting cab driven by a man who later introduces himself as Clark (Penn). Clark is a talker but not incessant, asking the woman (known only as Girlie) where she’s flying from and what she does for work. It’s late, but Girlie is game for the conversation. She responds with a mischievous glint in her eye to even Clark’s more probing questions about her past and her job and her love life, a welcome distraction from the boyfriend who keeps sending her vulgar and ridiculous sexts. Their conversation becomes a game as they trade bits of their past and their memories like poker chips.
As far as what “happens,” that’s it. The movie proceeds, more or less in real time, as the cab drives the route from JFK to Midtown Manhattan, only stopping toward the middle when Clark runs up against a traffic jam. It’s a fun idea, but the spareness means the whole film basically rests on the performances of a pair of actors and the dialogue they’re handed. I can understand the appeal of scripts like this to actors like Johnson and Penn—one still attempting to free herself from the successful yet derided franchise that made her a star, the other later in his career and searching for meatier character work. No one has to worry about costume changes or traveling to locations or expensive special effects.
