Enjoy this bonus Film Club post!
Film: Daddio (2024), in U.S. theaters June 28, 2024
Screenwriter and Director: Christy Hall
Starring: Dakota Johnson (young woman, “Girlie”), Sean Penn (taxi driver, “Clark”)
Dear Acting Students and Aspirants,
What is an actor? How would you define that title?
We listen to actors speak all the time. We watch them. We want to hear their take on life and enlightenment. But what, truly, is an actor all about?
I was on a date recently with a man and he was not a creative person. We got on this topic of acting, and he seemed to be genuinely concerned that if I was an actor, he could not trust that I was being honest with him. What if I was so good that I was pretending to be someone else while in his presence?
I didn’t know how to address that concern in any helpful or fruitful way. We seemed to be having two different conversations, or we had two entirely different views of reality and what matters in life. His concern seemed to be based in an idea that I would say the things I needed to say to perhaps get something from him? Bamboozle him? Create a character and lie to him?
My concern was that he did not know what art was. And how could I have a second date or any interesting conversation with a person who didn’t know what art was?
So for the sake of art, I will talk about what I think acting is. I think is very strange, very scary, very annoying, and very true to life. It is an art and a craft. It has nothing to do with being yourself, and everything to do with bringing your whole self. You are a walking paradox: yourself and somebody else. Your energy is true to life, but the label, or appearance, or lines you say, are in service of a story or a moment, and your work provides an opportunity for deep connections and understanding about life.
Do you know how many people are acting every day, as a mode of being rather than an art form?
And where are the places where people can be fully themselves, in all their vulnerability, and still feel safe, loved, and accepted? Those places are rare, and people with whom we can be bare and original—those people are rare, too. Many people, off stage, are actors and performers as a modus operandi. Then there are the truth-tellers, the artists.
What the new movie Daddio captures is a place where two people can be bare. There are no expectations they put upon one another. There is no reason for either of them to see each other again. So why not use such an opportunity to ask questions and see someone as she or he really is, and learn, and grow?
In this film, the “seen” one, the one being looked at and focused upon, is the young woman, played by Dakota Johnson. Even though this film is written and directed by a filmmaker making her debut (Christy Hall), the film examines the beauty, depth, confusion, mystery, and inner girl from the angle of an older, blue-collar man who may or may not want to sleep with her. She is in the spotlight. We are looking at her, questioning her with curiosity and adoration, the same way he is. We want better for her. We want to hold her. We want to be her daddy.
The film examines why, for women, there seems to be a deep desire to please and cater to and care for a man. A daddy complex, perhaps? The “daddy” issue, that Freudian jawn? Even the word “daddy” is tainted in our culture, because of the pornography industry, which has dramatically changed the way people interact with one another and our world.
Much of our cultural understanding of fathers, or “daddies,” stems from readings of scriptures and religion. If we are rooted in a Judeo-Christian ideology and culture, a masculine-dominant paradigm, then we are imbued in our psyches with the consciousness/unconsciousness of women as helpers to men. We are surrounded with the word “man” everywhere to signify human, or person, which keeps leaving women on the sidelines of actual personhood. Our very language signifies that women are secondary, are the support network, to the universal life experience of a man or men, or “the daddy". And who is this father figure that looms overhead in the skies—is he a mysterious wacko? We can’t quite trust him because people have done really terrible things in his name, but we secretly want his approval.
I would suggest that a viewer brings all of this background and baggage and collective imagining to the film Daddio, in which we watch a beautiful young woman and a sharp older man in a cab, talking about life and relationships and their childhoods, and why men and women operate differently.
The only way to make a movie like this work—a movie so simple and poignant—is to have amazing acting. It needs actors who know how to feel every emotion and relate to the characters they embody deeply. It needs actors whose faces and eyes and the smallest movements of their hands can signify a world and a history. And the person behind the camera—the one providing the perspective, the look-in, the insight—needs to be a presence of love and spaciousness that allows the actors to thrive. Because a two-person movie in one main location—so simple, not easy—needs to be carried by the inner worlds of the actors. Therefore, those inner worlds ought to be rich. Those inner worlds need to have gone through some sparks and some swamps. Those inner worlds would have had to be shattered and made new a few times.
Back to this main question: What is an actor?
The guy I was on a date with may have actually wanted to know. But I think what he was really asking was, “How do I know what is true?”
If I had to put this answer into words, I would tell him this:
It’s all inside. Living a true life means bringing the inside out.
We are ghosts and we are angels, and sometimes we land.
Namaste,
Ms. Wonderful
*Daddio premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.
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