R | 1h 40m | Drama | June 28, 2024
“Daddio” is basically the story of one woman’s overly long, late night, therapeutic cab ride from JFK airport to New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, which is about 10 minutes west of Times Square.
Penn
Everyone knows Dakota Johnson these days, but Gen Z is mostly clueless as to just how huge Sean Penn was in the 1980s and ‘90s—an electrifying, gruff, chain-smoking, antisocial antidote to the yuppified Brat Pack, and the direct heir to the method-acting crowns of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.Penn hasn’t been this charming ... maybe ever? Clark, the cheerfully know-it-all cabbie with the sailor’s vocabulary, engages Ms. Johnson’s Girlie in a prolonged, provocative (invasive, actually), and politically incorrect conversation, and is then given pause when he discovers she can dish it out in equal measure.
Breaking It Down
I live in Hell’s Kitchen and get stuck in cabs with loquacious cabbies all the time, so this was not escapism for me whatsoever; this is my life. As the saying goes: “New York is a fabulous place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live here.”In New York (and everywhere), there are three professions that psychology and psychiatry are basically glorified forms of: 1) bartending 2) personal training, and 3) cab-driving. If you’re bartending properly, your late-night customer is metaphorically lying across the Freudian couch of three bar stools, pouring his or her heart out about their problems (and tips out of their wallet). In personal training, your client is lying on the Freudian couch of the bench-press bench, pouring his or her heart out (and losing weight at the same time. If they can’t do both simultaneously, you’re fired).
The taxi-cab environment prompts a lot of confessionals too; that plexiglass partition with the little sliding window can subconsciously feel very familiar to Catholics.
‘Daddio’
So it’s basically a one-hour-and-40-minute cab ride, stuck in traffic, talking about life and problems. Santa Monica-born Mr. Penn does a passable if inconsistent New York accent. Ms. Johnson is cute. So there’s that. And for the last 10 minutes, the film is adorable. It almost made the whole thing worthwhile. It gives one hope for humanity.
You’ve heard the synopsis, so here’s the analysis: Things have evolved in society to the point where Americans, if they hang out for more than 10 minutes and have even a modicum of friendly chemistry, immediately become, more or less, family. It’s Marshall McLuhan’s global village manifested.
Via social media, cell phones, film, Oprah, Jerry Springer, Howard Stern, popular music, stand-up comedy, and, it must be said—porn—Americans have completely lost their filters and their buffer zones, and there’s no longer such a thing as “TMI” (too much information). Within five minutes, Americans can easily be sharing graphic descriptions of their sex lives and think nothing of it (the currently viral “Hawk Tuah” girl being an absolutely perfect example of this). It’s the new norm. This is not news to Gen Z and Gen Alpha, not even for Gen X, particularly. But for Boomers, this still gives one pause.
And so the father-aged cabbie’s expletive-laden conversation with the nubile young beauty walks a thin line between avuncular and creepy for an uncomfortable half hour. And all the while she’s on the phone with her (daddy-issues-spawned) older married-man “boyfriend,” who’s sexting her porn stuff. And she sexts some porn things back.
And it’s a highly productive therapy session for her. Which you know that she deeply grasps the value of. I won’t reveal how.
And that’s it. And that’s nice.
But, call me old-fashioned—I just don’t want to see what kind of photo her boyfriend is sexting (and you do see it; should have slapped an X-rating on this), and I don’t want to hear 800 f-bombs from the both of them. And I don’t wanna drive up 10th avenue and hang a right on 44th Street—I do that constantly.
