Daddio is a talker… a movie about conversation. It’s one of those and you’ll like it if you love that subgenre and hate it if you don’t. I dig it so I dug it… even if it’s not the best casual talker I’ve ever seen.
It’s about a young woman returning home to NYC. She gets into a cab and has a long conversation with the driver as he takes her home. Conversations about computers and life and love and dads and daddies come up. Life lessons are learned.
She’s played by Dakota Johnson in full sly “I’m onto you” smile and he’s played by Sean Penn in NYC cabbie mode (which mainly means his aged, sonorous voice fills the cab while her softer, sultry voice plays against him). Both of them are great… it was nice to see Sean Penn back in the driver’s seat (ahem) and Dakota has actually never been better. Her witty, intelligent, and sly sexy smile only elevate her deeper acting talent… especially in the final act.
The writing is compelling and the two have chemistry together. I was hoping for one stream of consciousness type screenplay but I kind of got another so I was a little disappointed. When it starts, the two talk about how computers work and how that relates to human nature as we grow… True/False, 1s and 0s. And I was hoping it’d go to more unique, unexpected directions like that… but mainly it winds up a dialog about relationships, cheating, and other matters of the heart (and groin).
And nothing wrong with that, but we’ve had a few of these types of talkers recently and I was hoping for some divergence. But the conversations were fun, flirty, and interesting anyway. Though maybe a little too open, a little too pointed for the service economy. If not for Dakota’s sexy, knowing smiles, Penn’s driver would probably have been on the wrong end of a lawsuit given how he pries into her life. One might argue this conversation wasn’t realistic in that regard… but one might be taking this too seriously if one applied that metric.
I enjoyed the film though even if I was hoping for different, more miscellaneous directions in the conversation. But, hey, the end was bittersweet with apt (if sometimes on-the-nosse) callbacks to earlier in the film. This is a solid, thoughtful flick.
Score: 83