Talking in Circles
Christy Hall’s debut two-hander has plenty to say about women, men and sex, almost all of it gratingly quaint.
Daddio
Director: Christy Hall • Writer: Christy Hall
Starring: Sean Penn, Dakota Johnson
USA • 1hr 40mins
Opens Hong Kong Aug 22 • IIB
Grade: C+
Any fewer than four characters in a movie best have something seriously fuckin’ deep and meaningful to say if they expect to keep you engaged for 90 minutes or thereabouts. There’s a tacit understanding that something is going to grab our eyes or ears when we see a movie – this is not the theatre – so demanding we forfeit the shiny things is a big ask. The gold standard of “Really, just two dudes talking?” filmmaking is Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre, which remains bafflingly compelling. Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? taps our train wreck curiosity and takes things in an entertainingly caustic, emotionally heightened direction. JC Chandor, Steven Knight and Alfonso Cuarón make the unseen a crucial player in All is Lost, Locke and Gravity. First time writer-director Christy Hall is trying to do something similar in her two-hander Daddio (don’t start me with that title), which listens to a cabbie and his fare prattle on for those 90-odd minutes about, essentially, how women are from Mars and men are from Venus, or whatever that ’90s bullshit was. Hall’s got two game actors in Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn, but remember the first condition? How these characters best have something seriously fuckin’ deep and meaningful to say? This is a problem.
Sometimes bored is just bored
A problem because though the duo yammer on about how they’re surprising each other, they’re really not that fascinating, and they don’t reveal much about people we don’t already know. It’s pretty obvious Daddio was originally conceived as a play, which Hall’s static direction and stagey compositions hint at. The conceit of the film is that, even with a car accident blocking the Long Island Expressway, it takes 90 minutes to get from JFK airport to midtown Manhattan in the middle of the night. Let’s just give Hall that one for the sake of her storytelling, which needs all the help it can get given the spatial constraints. Knight actually shot Locke while driving on the M6, whereas Hall shot Daddio on a sound stage using digital backdrops. There is a marked difference in visual feel because of it.
So it’s late at night and millennial IT type Girlie (Johnson) hops in Clark’s (Penn) taxi to go home. She considers sending a message to someone, thinks better of it, and has her thoughts interrupted by the cabbie. He appreciates that she’s not glued to her phone. They get to chatting, and light conversation eventually morphs into intimacy, each secure in the knowledge they’ll never see the other ever again. Regardless of what Clark thinks, Girlie does start messaging with her boyfriend, who the twice-divorced Clark correctly guesses is married once he decides to get all intrusive. Seriously, step the fuck off, dude. As Girlie’s messages turn into the grossest, most juvenile sexts ever, Clark turns armchair relationship therapist and gives Girlie a lesson in gender essentialism, sex, power and perception. They also unpack her massive baggage, which anyone who’s ever taken Grade 12 psychology could probably parse.
It’s intensely disappointing that the observations Clark and Girlie toss back and forth are so incredibly tedious and reductive, because a thoughtful drama that asks us to listen to what’s being said, internalise it or debate it, free of CGI, pyrotechnics and complex stunts is something of a cinematic respite these days. Hall’s script goes on and on about the dangers of jumping to conclusions about each other based on job, age, marital status, even our names, but she never gives Clark or Girlie anything to really chew on (besides gum) with regards to those more interesting subjects given the world such as it is. And really, does Hall think any of us is shocked, shocked!, that a twentysomething woman could be working in IT? If anyone could do something with those ideas it’s Penn, because no matter how dicky he might seem these days chasing Mexican cartel leaders, he’s a great actor. He’s refreshingly un-Penn-ish here, and his performance has the lived-in ease of someone who’s familiar with the mechanics of the stage. He could have gone big, but he keeps things on a simmer and elevates Johnson’s performance in doing so. Hey, I’m Team Johnson all the way, but Daddio isn’t her best work. She’s flat and bored looking – but not in a hilariously “over it” way à la Madame Web. That said, making the moment Girlie delicately taps the “Send” button a monumental one is a considerable challenge. — DEK