In decades past, Ethan Coen has primarily come to fame through collaborations with his brother Joel. This time, Coen put a film together with his wife Tricia Cooke, who co-wrote and co-produced the film while also serving as editor. I hasten to add that while Cooke and Coen are spouses and co-parents, Cooke has self-identified as lesbian since before they met. I’m not going to ask how that works, it’s really none of my business, but it did all kinds of favors for this picture.
Drive-Away Dolls tells the story of two open lesbians named Jamie and Marian, respectively played by Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan. Marian is a wallflower who keeps herself so tightly buttoned-up that she doesn’t have much of any romantic or sexual life to speak of. Compare that to Jamie, such a promiscuous and ill-mannered loose cannon that she’s in the middle of a nasty breakup with the girlfriend she just cheated on (Sukie, played by Beanie Feldstein).
Marian is looking for greener and more comfortable pastures, while Jamie wants to get out of town long enough for her more recent misadventures to blow over. Also, Jamie wants to try and get Marian some desperately needed no-strings-attached sex. Thus the two of them take part in a “drive-away”, an agreement to deliver a car from Philadelphia to Tallahassee. It’s basically a one-way car rental.
Unfortunately, their car came with a mysterious and highly valuable cargo belonging to a shadowy criminal element. So now a trio of mercenaries (played by Colman Domingo, Joey Slotnik, and C.J. Wilson) are chasing after our girls to get their attache case back. Because even with only one half of the Coen Brothers involved, some things remain constant.
Among those constants are whip-smart dialogue and utterly flawless casting. From our two lead performers down to the last background bit player, everybody in this whole damn movie is funny and memorable. Case in point: Pedro Pascal gets killed off within the first two minutes, but his performance is so much funnier and over-the-top memorable precisely because it’s Pedro Pascal mugging for the camera. It’s the same deal with Matt Damon and Miley Cyrus — Ethan Coen could’ve gotten literally anyone to play those bit parts, but they pop so much harder precisely because it’s Matt Damon and Miley Cyrus. Of course, that’s not to diminish such accomplished character actors as Bill Camp and C.J. Wilson, all of whom know damn well how to play a comic relief character in an Ethan Coen picture.
That said, of course the whole movie revolves around Qualley and Viswanathan, who capably anchor the proceedings. Qualley goes all-out in playing a promiscuous firecracker while Viswanathan plays the “straight man”, and both of them play their respective comedic roles in ways that are endearingly hilarious. Their comedic interplay is fantastic, and their chemistry makes their whole will-they-won’t-they arc compelling to watch.
(Side note: Though Viswanathan is clearly of Indian descent, her character isn’t written to be any particular race. There’s nothing in the plot or themes or character development that says Marian had to be an Indian woman, Viswanathan got cast because she’s that damned good at playing a deadpan lesbian. Kudos.)
Though I’d argue the real MVP here is Tricia Cooke. It makes a huge difference to have an actual lesbian guiding Coen’s hand on the screenplay, and most especially in the editing booth. It’s genuinely fascinating to watch the nude scenes and sex scenes, knowing it was a straight man who framed and shot everything while a lesbian determined when and where to cut between takes.
I want to be clear that this is not a bad movie. It’s bold, it’s subversive, it’s sexy, it’s hilariously funny… but there’s still the nagging feeling like this isn’t as great as it should’ve been. So, what went wrong?
Well, let’s start with the scene transitions. Sometimes, the cuts slam into each other in a way that makes for a neat visual gag. Other times, the scene transitions go into this trippy psychedelic sort of trance and it takes way too long for the reveal that these transitions are actually foreshadowing. And even when the reveal comes, the trippy colors don’t match with the setting or tone of the film.
Hell, even the setting doesn’t match the setting of the film. The movie supposedly takes place in 1999, but the ’90s were so famously homophobic that it doesn’t feel in keeping with the film’s depiction of openly gay life. I might add that the film ends with the remark that gay marriage is legal in the state of Massachusetts — that didn’t happen until 2004.
The film’s depiction of culture and technology would’ve felt much more at home in the mid-’00s. More importantly, the film’s themes feel like they came right out of the mid-’00s. I’m obviously not at liberty to spoil much, but suffice to say a political sex scandal is a rather crucial plot development. In the mid-’00s, it was plausible that a politician could get into hot water for sexual misconduct. But that statement loses a lot of punch in 1999, after Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial washed out and the nation was looking ahead to the 2000 election year. And nowadays, the notion that a politician could lose his career over a sex scandal feels outright quaint.
Granted, this would hardly be the first of Coen’s comedies to run the audience ragged looking for a point in what was ultimately a shaggy dog joke — indeed, that was pretty much the whole point of Burn After Reading. Even so, it’s frustrating how the film comes so tantalizingly close to making a coherent point, only to either pull away or not go far enough. My personal favorite example was the satirical joke about the commodification of bodies and the sexual double-standard thereof. This cast and crew could’ve made a whole movie on the subject, but it’s reduced to a one-off joke in the climax. By contrast, there’s a recurring sentiment about human connection, but it’s spread too thin to mean much of anything.
Speaking of the climax, I suspect this is a movie that fell victim to its own budget. A cross-country screwball comedy road trip movie like this one kept demanding a massive convoluted climax that never really came. Instead, we get one prominent subplot that more or less resolves itself without much effort or difficulty, and the other subplots dovetail in a way that’s kinda clever and funny. So we get two smaller climaxes instead of everything building up to a single “wow” finish. It’s not enough.
Drive-Away Dolls is another of those unfortunate films with so many stellar individual parts that don’t quite mesh together into a greater whole. Couple the episodic nature of the “road movie” plot with the aggressively irreverent comedy and you’ve got a film too erratic to stick with any kind of tone or message. Even so, the comedy is genuinely funny and the central Qualley/Viswanathan chemistry is all aces from start to finish, which is enough to keep the film afloat through its scant 85-minute runtime.
I don’t expect this movie will hold up well on repeat viewings, and it doesn’t warrant a big-screen viewing by any means. But there could be a lot of fun to be had with this on home video.