Daddio (2023): Christy Hall’s Tale of a Woman and her Taxi Driver, Starring Dakota Johnson and Oscar Winner Sean Penn (AMOUR)

DADDIO

Director Christy Hall

World Premiered at Telluride Fest to Critical Acclaim

Stars: Sean Penn, Dakota Johnson

Hall, who co-created the critically acclaimed but now-canceled Netflix series I Am Not Okay With This, this enclosed (but not claustrophobic) drama about a woman and her taxi driver who, over the course of a cab ride from the JFK airport, engage in life-changing conversation.

Why did the film ignore?

We designate it with our AMOUR label, films Abandoned, Misunderstood, Overlooked, Underestimated, Revisited).

Entirely set in a taxi stuck at night on jammed highway heading from New York City’s JFK airport to Manhattan, debuting writer-director Christy Hall has created an intimate two-hander between a vet New York cabbie who thinks he’s seen it all and a young woman still trying to figure things out.

Sean Penn plays working-class guy with too many opinions about everything, while Dakota Johnson is a younger woman, willing–and needing–to share her problems with a stranger, who’s sort of a shrink.

Daisy Ridley, the original actor for the project, has been replaced by Dakota Johnson, who has been circling around major stardom for a decade now.

Christy Hall produced the film alongside Emma Tillinger Koskoff, while Johnson and Ro Donnelly will produce under their TeaTime Pictures banner.

Johnson plays a young woman who arrives in New York and Penn plays a taxi driver, who strikes up an unexpected conversation with his passenger, which quickly changes from amusing, basic exchanges to comical banter to find honesty with regards to delicate topics such as love, loss, sex and power dynamics within relationships.

Photo: Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Penn fancies himself an expert on human nature, attempting to psychoanalyze the wary young woman, and gradually, he draws out details about her situation, partly based on her body language.

Hall, who also wrote “It Ends with Us,” has made an intriguing movie, which, among other things, deals with father issues and trust.

Johnson recently starred alongside Jason Segel and Casey Affleck in the drama Our Friend, and she’ll soon be seen in a brief but fun role in St. Vincent’s The Nowhere Inn.

Penn starred alongside Julia Roberts and Dan Stevens in Sam Esmail’s Watergate series Gaslit, and he plays President Andrew Jackson in HBO’s limited series American Lion.

Excellent Movies of Similar Claustrophobic Setting:

Locke (2013), written and directed by Steven Knight, starring Tom Hardy in a superb performance that earned him the Best Actor from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA).