Who’s Gonna Drive You Home Tonight?

My thoughts on Daddio and A Family Affair

From what I have read, Daddio, the debut film from writer-director Christy Hall, was originally conceived as a theatrical play before eventually transmogrifying into its cinematic incarnation and you can still feel it’s stagebound origins while watching it. As it begins, a young woman (Dakota Johnson) lands at JFK late one evening and hails a cab for midtown Manhattan that is driven by Claude (Sean Penn), a cheerfully garrulous Everyman type who begins peppering her with questions that she politely elects to respond to instead of sitting in silence while staring at her phone. When the ride comes to a temporary but extended halt during a traffic jam caused by a car accident up ahead, the conversation—which up until now has been mostly friendly banter and one-upmanship—takes a turn for the serious as they talk about things like age, gender, sex and relationship issues with the kind of conversational confidence that you can sometimes find when you know that you will almost certainly never see the person that you are talking to again. In terms of narrative developments, that is pretty much it for the film—the closest that it ever get to suspense comes with the question of how much the woman (who is never named and is referred to in the credits only as “Girlie”) will tip at the end of the ride—I’d tell you but I am sure that if I did, someone would complain about the lack of a spoiler alert.

With only two speaking roles and, save for a couple of moments towards the end, only the confines of the cab as the sole location, Daddio may strike some as being little more than an extended gimmick posing as a film. Although it has been made with enough visual flair (courtesy of cinematographer Phaedon Papamichael) to accurately capture the at-times otherworldly sensation that one can get riding off into the night in the back of a strange car, the increasingly confessional chatter between the two (especially as it relates to Girlie’s troubled romantic relationship with an unseen guy who keeps sexting her in increasingly gauche ways and the details concerning the trip to Oklahoma from which she has just returned) feels less like the kind of natural conversation that might spontaneously develop between strangers crossing paths for the first time (as was seen and heard in the masterful Before Sunrise) and more like overly theatrical contrivances that don’t really build to anything in the end.  And yet, despite the occasional clunkiness of the writing, Daddio comes much closer to working than it probably has any right to and that is due almost entirely to the performances from Penn and Johnson. That shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise, of course, as both are brilliant performers who have shown themselves as being more than capable of overcoming iffy material in the past. Here, they create a nice dynamic between them with their differing acting styles meshing together in interesting ways that help to bring a ring of truth to even the least convincing of exchanges. Daddio is undeniably uneven and doesn’t quite work when all is said and done but as a master class in acting from two highly skilled performers, it is more or less worth a look.

On the other hand, star power alone cannot begin to overcome the intrinsic failings of A Family Affair, a multigenerational romance/Hollywood satire whose ultimate failings are all the more perplexing as it was directed by Richard LaGravenese, whose previous credits include the lovely and perpetually underrated Living Out Loud, a film that you should immediately take a look at right now if you haven’t already seen it. Here, Joey King stars as Zara, a young woman who is at loose ends both professionally and personally—she works as the personal assistant to spoiled movie star Chris Cole (Zac Efron), sadly spending most of her time running various demeaning errands, and lives at home and in the shadow of her widowed mother Brooke (Nicole Kidman), a famed writer. After being pushed one time too many by Chris, Zara quits her job and when he turns up at the house in a brief moment of regret to try to convince her to come back when only Brooke is at home, the two hit it off and immediately fall into bed together, which is where Zara catches them. While Brooke and Chris find themselves trying to make a go of this unexpected development, Zara spends all of her time complaining about it in ways that threaten to drive wedges in her relationships with both her mother and her best friend (Liza Koshy) as well as the one between her mom and her employer.

For those of you scoring at home, this marks the second time in the last couple of months that we have seen a film premiering on a streaming service centering on a relationship between an older woman and a younger man who just happens to be a huge celebrity that inspires concern from the woman’s daughter, following the recent The Idea of You. That movie was mostly silly and inconsequential but it had a spirited and strong performance by Anne Hathaway as the woman and some glimmers of genuine chemistry between her and Nicholas Galitzine as the boy toy in question to help move it along. Here, the screenplay by Carrie Solomon never comes across as anything other than refried Nancy Meyers, the various relationships are never particularly convincing and the character of Zara is so obnoxious, self-absorbed and entitled (she has worked for Chris for two years and is upset that she isn’t already running his production company) that I found myself wondering why any of the people in her orbit would want to have anything to do with her in the first place. What really damages the film is the lack of any real heat between Kidman and Efron that might have helped push things along beyond the screenplay flaws. (The two demonstrated more convincing byplay in their previous film together, the anything-but-a-romcom The Paperboy, than they ever muster up here.)  Coming across more like a piece of Hallmark Channel holiday fodder (even including a long sequence set over the Christmas holidays) that somehow managed to acquire a cast far stronger than it deserves (including Kathy Bates as the feisty grandmother who turns in the liveliest performance by far), A Family Affair is yet another forgettable bit of Netflix content that will get some attention for a few days thanks to the high profile of the cast but which will eventually get buried in the algorithm and forgotten, hopefully sooner than later.