Like the bartenders and baristas, taxi drivers can conceivably function as therapists — service workers who provide an ear to listen and a shoulder to cry on. Keep the meter running long enough, and you might charge right into a breakthrough. At least, the movies' romantic version of an old-fashioned taxi hack might be. You might get an Uber and/or Lyft driver who's dying to hear all about your life, but they're more likely to be just another gig economy worker trying to get through the day. Assuming, of course, they're not an actual licensed therapist behind the wheel of the ride-app, moonlighting to get by.
Dad builds on this myth of the checkered cab driver as outer-borough sage and surrogate analyst, however, in a way that feels both quaint and more than a little unsettling. First, you have to believe that, given the perfect storm—a ride from JFK Airport to midtown Manhattan suddenly lengthened, conveniently by traffic—it would, in the year of our lord 2024, allow a young woman in her twenties to participate in a sharp conversation with a sixty-something driver that turns into a battle of the sexes. Stranger things have certainly happened. But the premise requires a leap of faith from the leap. And even if you buy into the conceit behind this feature-length bottle episode, writer-director Christy Hall has the uphill battle of convincing you that such creatures still roam the Earth, offering advice on how to move confessionals. You half expect the guy on the other side of the window to ask if his passenger caught the Brooklyn Dodgers game or if she had the hot dogs at Coney Island. This is the “graphic” part.
The “worrying” part comes through the casting, and here it is Dad it at least manages to make this two-handed way much more interesting than it should be. Dakota Johnson is the woman in the backseat—she's just referred to as “Girlie” in the credits, which, okay, sure—and she's headed back to her place on 44th St, between 9th and 10th. Sean Penn is Clark, the guy in the driver's seat who hails from Queens and says his honor is not a tourist after giving him crossroads instead of an address.
It's a little flirt, a lot flint, a pair of eyes in the mirror making small talk as they head downtown. As for Girie, she's suitably reserved, but also shockingly forthcoming, and not averse to sparring with the biggest man by Cardinal Richelieu's facial hair. He will entertain his rants about how no one uses paper money anymore and how everyone just uploads all their information to this big digital cloud in the sky. “One day this cloud is going to open up and rain acid on all our dumb faces,” Clark claims. It's not exactly “a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets,” but listen, you can't have it all.
Meanwhile, Girlie's phone is blowing up with texts from the single most needy, horny man in the tri-state area, who vacillates between asking about her trip and asking her to help him finish as soon as possible, not it matters that he's in a bar and she's in the back of a cab on the interstate. Clark realizes that these messages are clearly bothering his passenger. He also seems to sense intuitively that a) the man is older, b) Girlie is not his wife, and c) there are more than a few daddy issues. Soon, curiosity leads to a deeper conversation about what men and women want, why they want it, how sex plays into everything, why she'll never get what she wants from this man, her past, his past etc.
Social crops seem to have been justified for the ride at this point. The same limits. The idea is somehow that, wandering down the 495 while the police clear away a car accident, a lot of truth bombs and F bombs can now be properly dropped. The question is not whether to drop the pretense of politeness in the name of being “real.” It's more like: What if Taxi driver was it one part gender studies and three parts therapy? There's a word for these specific types of exchanges, whether you see them on stage or occasionally on screen, and that's “horse.” It's hard to shake the feeling of watching human mouthpieces push rhetorical talking points in the name of achieving some kind of deep insight and, more often than not, failing to hit their targets.
What complicates things here are the actors — specifically, the fact that you can't stand to hear them being forced to say these lines and yet you can't look away from what they're both doing while they're stuck in this confined cinematic space . Johnson's career has been unfairly reduced to one long supercut, when in fact she's a supremely talented performer capable of communicating more than millennial ennui or channeling someone's idea of Capital-S Sexiness. She brings a fascinating undercurrent of vulnerability and uncertainty to her unfortunately-named character, who seems genuinely unsure about this lopsided romantic relationship ahead. You see someone playing someone who is playing is boring them, but they are not. It's a performance of defenses that are constantly going down and up.
Her relationship with Penn, who is unsurprisingly the main reason to suffer DadThe litany of recycled Mars vs. Venus gender differences is enough to prevent some of the more contentious back-and-forths from turning into outright howlers. And the idea of him playing this possibly paternal, possibly predatory street philosopher is the only inspired thing that works. Between that and the recently released Alphabet City, Penn carves out a nice late-career niche as a New York nightfighter, and the way he gives Clarke a genuine working-class charm and cocky gentility—but with enough danger to make you wonder if some of it Neanderthal's views are Threats in Disguise — they add a whole other dimension to that long, dark airport soul commute. Watching the actor work remains a wonderful, if increasingly rare, treat. You just have to pay a pretty heavy price to do it with this stress test.
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