Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Ethan Coen
Starring: Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, Beanie Feldstein, Pedro Pascal,
Colman Domingo, Bill Camp, Matt Damon
Throughout their career the Coen brothers have vacillated, not always
successfully it must be said, between comedy and drama. The question of
which brother was the "serious" one and which the comic has been
somewhat answered by each of the Coens having now gone their own way. In
2021 Joel gave us the Shakespeare adaptation
The Tragedy of Macbeth. Now Ethan gives us something as far from Shakespeare as you could
imagine, a knockabout sex caper.
Drive-Away Dolls was originally conceived in the early
2000s with Alison Anders marked to direct under the title "Drive-Away
Dykes" before it fell apart. With time on their hands during the
pandemic, Coen and his wife Tricia Cooke (editor of many of the
Coens' films) dusted down the script and decided it would serve as
Ethan's solo debut. It seems few changes were made to that early 2000s
draft as it's very much a crime caper in the vein of all those awful
Tarantino wannabes of the late '90s. The film keeps its 1999 setting,
which helpfully removes any plot obstacles that might be posed by
today's technology, but it's more indebted to the cinema of earlier
decades. It owes a lot to 1970s female-led exploitation movies,
particularly Michael Pressman's
The Great Texas Dynamite Chase. Like Claudia Jennings and Jocelyn Jones in that drive-in classic,
Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan play a
free-wheeling Texan gal and an uptight young middle class woman who find
themselves on a raucous road trip. They also happen to be lesbians,
which makes some of the film's casual approach to sexuality jar with the
1999 setting. But in its juvenile execution
Drive-Away Dolls has more in common with the immature sex
comedies of the 1980s.
Qualley adopts an often impenetrable Texan drawl as Jamie, a sexually
promiscuous free spirit who finds herself homeless when her police
officer girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein) tires of her
infidelity and kicks her out of her apartment. With nowhere else to go,
Jamie decides to tag along with her uptight friend Marian (Viswanathan)
on a trip from Philadelphia to Florida to deliver a drive-away
car.
Due to a mix-up, the girls end up with a car that was meant to be
picked up by a pair of hoodlums (Joey Slotnick and
CJ Wilson) working for a mobster known as "The Chief" (a wasted
Colman Domingo). The trunk of the car contains a macguffin whose
nature is kept secret until a late reveal played for the most
sophomoronic of laughs, leading to a cross country pursuit.
As Jamie and Marian share the adventure a
Sure Thing dynamic develops as the former attempts to get
the latter to loosen up. The arc of their budding romance resolves far
too quickly for the viewer to become significantly invested however.
It's less "Will they, won't they?" and more "Oh, I guess they just did"
as they start snogging on their first motel stop. Once they hook up
their dynamic becomes redundant as any existing conflict is erased.
Jamie and Marian are cardboard characters, so it's no surprise they turn
to mush as soon as they get wet. Like a disastrous one-night stand,
Drive-Away Dolls shoots its load early and spends the rest
of the running time trying to figure out how to make its undignified
exit.
The film's progressive sexual politics are undermined by an ultimately
conservative view of Jamie and Sukie's relationship, with the
liberal-minded Jamie being the one who has to make all the compromises
to suit Sukie's shrewish worldview. How many times have we seen this
play out in modern American comedies? Wouldn't it be nice to see an
American sex comedy that doesn't judge its promiscuous female lead in
such a manner, like the revolutionary for their era '70s capers
Drive-Away Dolls harks back to? Ironically the film takes
a cheap shot at Republicans at one point while reinforcing the sort of
dated "family values" such conservatives obsess over.
If you find the mere sight of a dildo hilarious then this is the movie
for you, as it's a gag that's repeated incessantly throughout Coen's
film. There are more dildos thrown about here than on the average hen
night. We also get the sight of a dog humping a prone mobster's leg. Oh
stop Ethan, I can't take any more of this hilarity. Like those terrible
British sex comedies of the '60s and their even worse American cousins
of the '80s, Drive-Away Dolls seems to find the very idea
of sex amusing and it counts on the audience having a similarly
antiquated mindset. If you're a grown-up in the year 2024 there's very
little to find amusing here.
Occasionally we're reminded that this is the work of a talented
filmmaker, such as a cleverly constructed flashback to a formative
experience in Marian's childhood. But too often Coen opts for tired
visual trickery that betrays the film's turn of the century origins,
including the classic post-Tarantino shtick of placing the camera in the
trunk of a car. While their characters are paper-thin, Qualley and
Viswanathan do make for a charming screen couple, which only makes it
all the more frustrating that they're lumbered with such shoddy
material.
Drive-Away Dolls is in UK/ROI
cinemas from March 15th.
