DRIVE AWAY DOLLS review
Horny Lesbian Crime Comedy Fails to Stimulate
On paper, Drive Away Dolls sounds like something that I would find immediately satisfying. A cartoonishly violent screwball comedy/film noir about a pair of lesbians who take a road trip and inadvertently get caught up in criminal mischief written and directed by one of the co-writers of Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country For Old Men? Take my money, my two hours, heck take my soul if such a thing exists and you want it. I don’t have a particular genre or type of film I gravitate toward, but it would be hard to screw up a flick with the above description so hard that I end up finding very little to like about it. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what Ethan Coen (brother of Joel, with whom he has worked with for almost 40 years) has done with his new movie.
Taking place in 1999 - right before 9/11, a few foreign invasions, and the re-ignition of conservative v. progressive culture wars made us all much more on edge - Drive Away Dolls tells the story of Jamie and Marian (Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan), two Philadelphia lesbians who decide to take a road trip to Florida to visit Marian’s aunt after Jamie gets caught cheating on her girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein). For transportation they turn to a driveaway company, where they accept a job to transport a car to Tallahassee. Unbeknownst to them, the car’s trunk contains a suitcase that may or may not belong to unsavory types looking to get it back through any means necessary.
A gory, atmospheric, yet cartoony cold open featuring the internet’s favorite zaddy Pedro Pascal got my heart pumping for some Blood Simple meets Raising Arizona-esque blast of weird fun. It’s an effective, solid start. It’s also arguably the film’s best moment. We then transition to one of the film’s many lesbian sex scenes, in which Jamie receives and gives oral sex to a woman who is not Sukie. A phone call interrupts the coitous, much to Jamie’s chagrin. Intercut with a look at Marian’s work life, in which she rejects a male coworker, the cutting and pacing of the scene is weirdly erratic, confusing, and, worst of all, just not funny. It’s played for laughs, to be sure, but it feels sloppy, like a first draft in both script and edit.
In fact, the whole movie is like that. For a film directed and co-written by a master filmmaker and storyteller, Drive Away Dolls feels like the debut of someone imitating his work. It features many Coen staples - bickering hitmen; quick-talking protagonist; strange detours into the backwoods of the south and the underbelly of the crime world - but almost none of it works. The bickering hitmen bit is especially painful - no disrespect to actors Joey Slotnick and CJ Wilson, who do the best they can with the material they are given. The film has an amateurish, shaggy feel, but not in the way early Coen Brothers movies do. The experimentation and scrappiness of those films work because the scripts supporting them are air tight. Drive Away Dolls has a screenplay that seems like it was written by a first year film student who had read about those films but was more interested in ‘90’s teen sex comedies.1
The movie does get points for being unabashedly pro-lesbian, even if some of the sex scenes come across as kind of creepy when you think about the fact that they were directed by a 66 year old straight man. The screenplay was co-written by queer filmmaker Tricia Cooke, though, who is also Ethan Coen’s wife. I have no idea if Cooke has a Jamie in her life, but lord help her lady bits if she does. Jamie is one of the most aggressively horny characters I’ve seen on-screen in some time, and her frankness in pursuing what she wants (sex with just about any woman she sees), while not groundbreaking, is kind of refreshing.
It’s also refreshing, in a way, that the film is so intent on being wacky. Ethan and his brother have always dabbled in the strange (when not diving head first into it), but Drive Away Dolls indulges in it perhaps more than most of his other work. The film is sometimes interrupted by acid-trip tinged interludes that seem to not have anything to do with the main plot - until they do. The movie is full of weird looking, memorable character actors that are such immediate fun that’s it’s only after they’ve been onscreen a few minutes that you realize how frustrating it is to see the foundation they’re working with is crumbling all around them.
Qualley and Viswanathan are, overall, solid, however Qualley sometimes feels miscast. Like the screenplay itself, it sometimes feels like she’s trying too hard to fit into a Coen production; like if AI studied Frances McDormand and Sam McMurray in Raising Arizona and created a crazy lesbian who couldn’t stop masturbating. At times her performance is funny; other times grating. It’s wildly uneven. Like her character, I suppose. Viswanathan is the more reserved Marian, and while she’s fine I couldn’t help but wonder if the film would have been better served if they had switched roles.
There’s a very funny scene with Matt Damon toward the end of the film2 that had a glimpse of what it could have been like had Cooke and Coen take another pass at the screenplay. After I laughed, though, I just got frustrated again that the movie was giving me so much slop. The reveal of the film’s MacGuffin is also hilarious, as is it’s skewering of hypocritical red-state family-values conservative politicians. But again, these things are surrounded by endlessly frustrating amateurish choices.
That’s the word, I guess, that best describes Drive Away Dolls. Frustrating. The Coen brothers didn’t always throw bulls-eyes when working together (Drive Away Dolls is Ethan’s first solo outing while 2021’s The Tragedy of Macbeth was Joel’s), and they certainly had their wild misses (I’m looking at you The Ladykillers). Drive Away Dolls, though, is one of the worst projects - if not the worst - to carry one of their names. It’s possible that I could change my tune years down the line - I’ve already come around to feeling a bit more positive about the film than I was when I first walked out of the theater, and I can see the film becoming a cult-classic of queer cinema. It’s certainly weird and irreverent enough to. Until then, though, it will remain a frustrating experience.
Jamie’s goal for almost the entire film is to get Marian laid. Nothing wrong with that character motivation at all, but American Pie did it funnier before Jamie and Marian even decided to haul ass down to Tallahassee.
I was the only one laughing at it in the theater, though, so take that for what it’s worth.