Film Journal 2024: Daddio

Film Journal 2024: Daddio
Directed by Christy Hall

I’m a big fan of Penn, and I can see his sensibilities all over this simple, single location two person conversational drama. But the one to really point here is Johnson. While Penn is busy doing his thing, she’s in the backseat quietly wrestling away the spotlight, little by little. There is a fun little section where they are kind of sparring back and forth, each attempting to outdo the other by telling the best story. Its here where she ultimately delivers the knock out punch.

It’s a meandering film on the surface, moving through topics as one might through the natural progression of a conversation with a stranger. It begins with shooting the breeze, and then slowly but surely over the course of a cab ride the conversation begins to break down the barriers of unfamiliarity and uncertainty, even symbolically at one moment when Penn’s character leans over and opens the glass barrier dividing front and back.

It’s a film about connection, and how quickly this can build through the simple art of conversation. There is a sense here in which Hall is commenting on conversation as a lost art, poking and prodding uncomfortable and unfiltered topics and language (this gets explicit and traverses subjects such as gender roles and sex) perhaps to see where even we as an audience might break or give. The power of the film though is in how two people across a generation gap are able to find themselves in the middle, ultimately reminding us of why all that uncomfortableness is worth the investment. Even for two people who will likely never cross paths again.

The title of the film might be strange, and truth be told I might have gone with something different. But I think I get it? The term does come up in the film, and in a way ties together the central relarionships that surface. Beyond the art of conversation, the film is exploring how our past connects to our present, binding our choices to things like fear and trauma, successss and joys, and filtering that through things like upbringing, parental, sibling and romantic relationship, and social constructs/constructed expectations. It’s a film about who informs our sense of identity and how this is formed through words of judgment or affirmation, be it verbal or physical. What we lack or what we gain often informs how we are able to respond, especially when life beats us down or tells us we are someone who cannot get back up (or that we must be or do something to be allowed to get back up under the power of another).

Not everyone is going to jive with this. It’s an investment and a journey, and the conversation takes a while to unearth what needs to be said, even trudging through uncomfortable silences and words in the process. But I do think it is ultimately doing something pretty special, especially as a debut.