Making mutual male and female compassion ‘cool’ again.
Just as Taylor Swift’s “F*** the patriarchy” controversy takes off, we’re lucky enough to get a rebuttal in Christy Hall’s film Daddio, starring Sean Penn as a father-figure New York City cab driver and Dakota Johnson as his privileged, morally confused tech-industry fare.
In her writer-director debut, Hall ponders male–female connections, exploring the kind of sexual panic that erupted when video of Swift’s recent European concert showed Wembley Stadium fans chanting Swift’s lyric “F*** the patriarchy.” This signified a breakdown of basic gender relations and social power, a breakdown that Hall’s movie rectifies. Both Hall and Swift are 34 years old, yet their approaches differ: Swift panders and agitates while Hall chooses empathy.
Hall’s title is a term of affection from a long time ago, during the Beat era, that denoted “cool” — meaning a fine, excellent, informed person. But Swift trades in sexual self-absorption and defensiveness that diminish our culture. Media outrage about Swift’s snarky cheerleading was a fair response to her regular bratty misandry, but upon close examination, it was uninformed.
In Swift’s 2021 music-video directorial debut All Too Well: The Short Film, she updated her 2012 song “All Too Well,” adding a new profane lyric: “And you were tossing me the car keys, ‘F*** patriarchy’ key chain on the ground.” Swift’s trite sarcasm aimed at soyboy hipster skirt-chasers. The key-chain image describes the kind of men she’s attracted to, yet it’s not exactly a critique. Sharper songwriting would indicate the kind of car a man drives — Porsche? Mercedes? Maybach? — which might tell us more about him and Swift. That’s the sort of detail that distinguishes Hall’s understanding of the career and class differences in Daddio.
Daddio is admirable for Hall’s effort to mend the schism between Millennial men and women, whereas “All Too Well” relishes girlish disaffection. (“You call me up again just to break me like a promise” is another maudlin, puerile lyric.) Swift is incapable of conveying the sort of emotional depth that makes Daddio a fascinating proposition. Clark the cabbie and the passenger he refers to as “Girlie” come together at first through flirtation, then through person-to-person candor. Despite separate backgrounds, their shared humanity allows them to understand each other’s career goals and romantic histories.
It is the rare Millennial movie that respects such commonplaces — as when Clark and Girlie both attempt big-city sophistication. Tom Hardy’s 2013 solo tour de force in Locke (one man’s life seen behind the wheel of a BMW) ventured similarly contrived compassion. Hall sustains this dynamic each time Girlie distances herself from Clark’s inquiries through the ubiquitous cellphone dodge. She takes calls from an older, married man — an adulterous relationship that evokes her own familial estrangement and her wariness toward Clark. This interplay suggests a theatrical “two-hander,” but Hall adds cinema to the frontseat/backseat conversation through startling/captivating, lewd/discreet montages of private text-messages.
Swift has claimed that her own short film was influenced by Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (enough said), but Hall’s exchange gets past trendy ideas and achieves personal poignance. Johnson’s career-girl sophistication subtly conveys her self-protective arrogance, and Penn’s own blue-collar machismo is also nuanced. What a pleasure to recall Penn’s talent, the actorliness that once made him heir to De Niro’s common-man gifts. Welcome the return of Sean Penn, the artist.
Daddio’s duet sustains Hall’s commitment to the humanism missing from today’s gender wars and trivialized by Swift’s pop-star conceits. (Her melody copies Don Henley’s “End of the Innocence” and the song’s sob-sister story is self-congratulatory — unlike Joan Armatrading’s confessional “The Weakness in Me,” a song of longing and regret powerful enough to inspire Morrissey’s “Suedehead.”)
Swift’s “All Too Well” isn’t necessarily anti-patriarchal, but it teaches misandry through mediocre music and rote smugness. (Swift patronizes fans who have no better idea what “patriarchy” means than she does.) In Daddio, Hall is unafraid to recognize the inherent dynamics of our patriarchal traditions; she insists on the common emotional needs hidden by professional, political façades.
