An early draft of this review was originally published on July 15, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
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Let me begin by highlighting what I find praise-worthy here:
With each passing year, Sean Penn becomes a more fascinating subject for creative cinematographers. Terrence Malick’s team of camera-wielding superheroes made much of his haunted, harrowed face in The Tree of Life. Here, Phedon Papamichael’s camera feasts on Penn’s weather-scarred visage.
It seems almost too predictable that the child of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith would be so radiant onscreen, and Dakota Johnson is luminous here. It’s as if she’s been waiting her whole career for someone to put her in a car at night for the duration of a film just so we can see how the lights of passing traffic glorify her face.
But this is movie-star glamour we’re talking about in both cases. I wouldn’t ever describe Daddio as a film of visual poetry. Instead, Papamichael’s savoring of the sexy sleekness of the hermetically sealed space is just flashy and entertaining, only occasionally turning to capture the greasy, polluted reality of New York night life for contrast, where we might have found context that could have brought more dimension to the primary drama.
And when it comes to what I admire about this film, well… that all I’ve got.
First-time film director Christy Hall strives to make strong impressions here by framing her film with ambitious limitations. First…
she shows impressive restraint by containing a feature-length drama in one Yellow Cab (although Steven Knight, who wrote and directed Locke with Tom Hardy, made something much more substantial out of this idea, and there was only one person in that car).
Second…
she ups the ante by locking two people in that cab who seem to be trying to outdo each other in their appalling behavior over the course of a long, long drive. If you’re like me, you will dread how much damage these two might do to each other, but you’ll be even more distressed if they somehow warm to each other and learn “life lessons” along the way.
Johnson plays “Girlie,” or at least that’s what the driver, Clark, calls her. She’s clearly suffering from some kind of relationship crisis, and we’re going to learn far too much about it: She’s with a guy who texts her as if she’s his personal sex toy, and who seems to think she’ll enjoy getting dick pics on her phone. (Yes, we have to see them up close on a big screen.) I fully expected to see her dump this guy’s ass by the halfway point of the film, somehow goaded to do so by Clark’s “wisdom.” What happens, or doesn’t happen, is so much worse than that. I’m tempted to say I’d rather have watched a movie about Girlie giving up on transit and just walking all the way home. But she’s making such appalling decisions every step of the way that I’d probably have bailed on that too.
Meanwhile, Penn’s Clark clearly doesn’t care if he loses his job over customer complaints, given how inappropriately he pokes that the boundaries of his fare’s privacy, and serves up unwanted advice.
If there had been a credit at the end of this film about a nightmare in a Yellow Cab revealing that the whole thing was sponsored by Uber, I would have believed it.
The movie seems to think I should be glowing with joy over the “connection” these two have made by the end, but I don’t see why and I’m not feelin’ it. It’s like watching one of those spoof trailers that plays Sleepless in Seattle as a stalker-horror movie, only this one plays Taxi Driver as a sentimental heart-warmer about how a mentally ill, isolated driver meets a self-destructive young woman and they learn something about the power of the human spirit or something.
Since I’m not feeling moved to say more, I’ll turn the mic over to Jeannette Catsoulis at The New York Times:
“Somehow, Penn never allows Clark’s inappropriateness to become predatory, and Johnson’s marvelously expressive features reveal details the dialogue declines to provide. Yet if there’s a finer point to any of this — beyond yes, talking to strangers is sometimes beneficial — it eluded me.”
Me too, Discerning Moviegoer. Me too.