She walks out of JFK and crawls into the cab. She’s going to 44th Street, between 9th and 10th. The cabbie knows the neighborhood well. He knows them all well: Twenty years driving a cab in New York City’ll do that for you.
“You’re my last fare of the night,” he tells her as the car begins its long asphalt glide.
“I win?” she says, smiling. And she wonders aloud what the prize might be.
She couldn’t know that this cab was about to become her confessional. That she and the driver would swap secrets like cards.
Her prize? A long cab ride. A new friend she’ll never see again. A lighter heart. Some newfound clarity. And, just possibly, a hint, a hope, of a new beginning.
Daddio’s primary—really only—characters are both deeply flawed. We hear plenty about their sins and shortcomings during their 100-minute cinematic cab ride. But they, like most of us sinners, have another side to them.
“You have a good heart,” the cabbie (Clark) tells his passenger (known only as Girlie). And we see hints of that. She’s having an affair (more on that later), but the affection she expresses for her lover’s wife—a woman who doesn’t know she exists—is palpable.
Girlie talks about finding a picture of her. “And I had this really strange feeling that maybe—that she and I could’ve been friends,” she confesses. Girlie seems to care for her lover’s children in her own, distant way, too. And while none of that is explicitly positive, it does speak to a purer longing. To be loved. To be a wife and mother. To be part of a family.
It’s a paradox, to be sure, given her own extra-marital, potentially home-wrecking affair with the woman’s husband. But it’s a reminder of something that we should always be mindful of: Our worst mistakes and most grievous of sins can be broken expressions of our brightest virtues, our most precious loves. Girlie’s wistful longing can’t redeem the affair. But perhaps we can understand her better.
As Girlie’s story spins out, Clark becomes more than just her driver. He’s her de facto counselor and, ultimately, friend. He gives her hard, honest advice (though we can take issue whether that advice is rooted in truth). He expresses surprising vulnerability at times, too. And Girlie smiles when she notices that he keeps a houseplant in his car—dutifully watering it at a stoplight, keeping this green, living thing going strong.
And, while elements in this film can be incredibly harsh, as we’ll see below, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that, at times, it sounds like Plugged In wrote the script.
“It’s nice that you’re not on your phone,” Clark tells Girlie early in the ride. “You don’t have to keep talking to me or nothing. It’s just—nice.” He rails against the impersonal nature of most transactions these days, many of which take place on a screen. It’s telling that the movie itself is a celebration of direct human contact, where people talk face to face and share some of their innermost thoughts. The pull of the screen—a pull that Girlie feels throughout the film—is real and, in a way, terrible. When she and Clark talk, Girlie becomes less a commodity (we’ll talk about that later) and more human.
Girlie has a cross tattooed on her hand—a cross that’s never explained, but one that the camera makes sure you notice, hinting at a past very different from her present.
Girlie mentions that she’s a computer programmer, and the two begin to talk about binary code. Girlie says that the ones and zeroes that make up the code are just manifestations of countless “true or false” statements the program reads. Clark suggests that we humans aren’t so different from those binary codes. Our own true-false statements—the ones we learn from childhood—impact how we operate, too. He offers several examples:
“You are stupid, true or false. You are ugly, true or false. Your mother loves you, true or false.” He recites a few others and adds a biggie. “Jesus, true or false. … That becomes the foundation from which we operate. Or maybe, I’m just talking bulls—.”
[Spoiler warning for the next three paragraphs.] Toward the end of the ride, Girlie drops a huge secret: Two weeks ago, she’d been pregnant. “Did you get rid of the baby?” Clark asks. “It got rid of me,” she says.
She’d planned to “get rid of it,” she admits. But she had a miscarriage instead, leading to two weeks of bleeding. Initially she felt relieved. But during her trip to Oklahoma visiting her sister, as she continued to bleed, she kept the baby, and the miscarriage, a secret. And she wound up “just feeling like—like trash.”
But the day before she returned to New York, she participated in a “rain dance” ceremony. And in that moment, she says, “I just begged the sky to rain down on me. To just clean me. To wash it all away.” The next morning, the bleeding stopped.
We mentioned that, for a good portion of the cab ride, Girlie’s attention is split between Clark and her phone. Her lover—an older, married man with three kids—is talking with her, at turns friendly and … hungry. He texts some incredibly lewd remarks and begs her to send nude pictures of herself. He sends a picture of his own aroused anatomy as an illustration of what she does to him. He follows it up with a call—presumably including sexual activity—but she rejects the call.
Ultimately, Girlie sends her unnamed lover a pic she finds in her own “private” folder (filled, it would seem, with photos of her exposed breasts, which we also see). And she sends a few lewd remarks of her own.
Clark knows almost immediately that she’s having an affair with a married man: The fact that she refuses to tell him her “boyfriend’s” first name, despite the inherent anonymity of a city filled with millions—is a dead giveaway. And he claims to know the dynamics of Girlie’s relationship, as “a man who’s married twice and [had] a lot of action on the side.”
Girlie made a mistake by telling her “beau” that she loved him, (Clark tells her). He’s not interested in that, and he’s certainly not interested in giving up his wife. “Men, we want to look good for other men,” he says. And while nice houses and cars are part of that, “It also includes the wife and the kids. Toys. … Looking like a family man is more important than being one,” he tells her.
He dives into his theories of sexual power and politics. Guys have affairs because of the sex; it feels good. When Girlie says that she knows of plenty of women who have affairs, too—that the sexual dynamics have changed in the last few decades—Clark insists the motivations are very different. Women have affairs to be wanted, and that translates into wanting to be loved. And men use that need to be loved to satisfy their own very shallow desires.
“You ladies fighting so hard to be our equal is actually, in essence, reducing most of you to nothing but toys,” he says.
And Clark asks Girlie if she ever calls her older lover “Daddy.”
She admits that she does.
Obviously, this line of discussion nods to forbidden, potentially incestuous desires—and the movie intends that. But Clark—fully in his guise as cab-driving psychologist—knows that other elements are at work. We learn that Girlie’s relationship with her own father was broken in its own way. And Clark surmises that Girlie, like so many other women, still is in some ways a little girl. And that “little girl inside just wants a daddy to hold her.” But, Clark adds, “The grown woman on the outside, she wants a different type of bedtime story, if you catch my drift.”
Clark describes his own first wife as having huge breasts and a vacuous mind. But when she gained weight, his wife stopped fulfilling her “marital duties,” which led to their split. He talks quite frankly about his own sexual exploits and desires (referencing specific acts).
As mentioned, Girlie was flying back from Oklahoma after visiting her sister, who’s currently in a relationship with another woman. We learn that Girlie’s sister also was once married to a man. Clark reminisces about a carload of clubbing women he drove home, and how the ride aroused him. When he and Girlie recite what might be on their bucket lists, Clark says he’d like to go to Japan, where they sell dirty panties from vending machines.
Clark and Girlie pass by what looks like a horrific, possibly fatal, car crash. They, and we, see plenty of wreckage, but no bodies.
Girlie tells Clark that her sister used to tie her up and leave her in the bathtub. Why? “If I ever got kidnapped, I’d be able to escape. That was her logic.”
We hear some discussion about excessive bleeding.
Nearly 100 f-words and 50 s-words. We also hear “a–,” “b–ch,” “d–n,” “h—,” “p-ss,” as well as plenty of crass slang terms for various anatomical parts.
Girlie’s lover apologizes for his lewd texts and behavior, claiming he was drunk. (But soon thereafter, he sends a few more suggestive missives.) She mentions that her father used to drink. Girlie also says that she, her sister and her sister’s girlfriend got very drunk during her last night in Oklahoma.
Clark mentions that people can get anything on an app these days, including marijuana. We hear that Girlie’s mom “went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back.” We hear a reference to a sour cocktail.
Clark says that he met his first wife when she and her friends climbed into his cab after a night of clubbing. They were obviously quite drunk and a bit rowdy, and …
… Clark’s future wife vomited in the back of Clark’s cab.
Stuck in the wake of a car crash, Clark tells Girlie that he needs to urinate badly (using more crass and colorful descriptors), and he nearly relieves himself in his own portable coffee mug. Girlie protests strongly, telling him to relieve himself outside. Which he does. (We hear, presumably, a police officer ask what he’s doing.)
Clark’s right: We live so much of our lives in front of screens. I’m using one now. I feel another in my pocket. On any given day, I spend more time staring at a screen—and at the myriad zeroes and ones that lurk inside, as Girlie describes them—than I spend looking at my own wife. My own kids.
And perhaps we can forget the power in looking someone in the eye. Touching someone on the hand. Sharing something from the soul.
Most of Clark’s passengers probably spend their cab rides glued to their screens. They pay for their fares on another—pushing a few extra buttons to give Clark a few extra dollars if the ride was quick and quiet. But here, on Clark’s last fare of the night, someone looks up. The two of them listen. They talk. They lean in. And we lean in, too.
Daddio consists of two actors (Dakota Fanning and Sean Penn, both giving remarkable performances) and 100 minutes of conversation. Nothing more.
But some elements make their dialogue deeply problematic as well.
We hear almost 100 f-words in those 100 minutes. We hear near-pornographic conversations and see near-pornographic images. The movie wants us to be revolted by Girlie’s sexting; to be drawn in, rather, by Clark’s conversations and some gentler, more familial texts that Girlie exchanges. But Daddio didn’t need to go there.
Some of the movie’s other tawdry elements are perhaps more necessary for the story—but, for many, they’ll be deal-killers all the same. Even though almost the whole movie takes place in a taxi cab, it manages to fit a host of R-rated problems in as luggage.
Daddio, down at its core, is a very delicate, very human story—but it then nearly buries all its delicacies in its issues. And while Daddio’s cab ride takes you down some surprising and even rewarding roads, the fare you pay might be steep.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
