If you’re going to make a two-character film you’d better have two really interesting people in your script and damned good actors to play them. Daddio has exactly that, and the result is an intriguing curio that serves as a showcase for the talents of Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn. He drives a Yellow Cab and she is his latest passenger at JFK airport, heading for midtown Manhattan. A bad accident has slowed traffic to a dead stop, which he takes as a cue to initiate a conversation with her.
Penn is a quintessential New Yorker whose job has made him an amateur psychologist and philosopher. He believes he can size up anybody who climbs into his taxi. In Johnson he senses a vulnerable subject, and she is willing to play along as they reveal things about their private lives that one normally wouldn’t share with a perfect stranger. (Once upon a time, colorful New York cabbies were a staple of Hollywood movies but they have vanished in recent years, much as they have in real life.)
If you can’t or won’t buy into this conceit you might want to skip Daddio and its nearly two hours of talk. But I am such a fan of Penn’s—and I’m becoming fonder of Johnson with each film I see her in—that I didn’t mind at all. Kudos to writer-director Christy Hall for pulling off such an elaborate coup.