Drive-Away Dolls

It’s probably too simplistic, and probably wrong, but on the evidence of Ethan Coen’s solo debut feature Drive-Away Dolls, he’s the goofy one in the Coen partnership and his brother Joel (who directed The Tragedy of Macbeth a few years back) is the serious one. (Typically perversely, the truth is probably the other way around.) Drive-Away Dolls, which Ethan also co-wrote with his wife Tricia Cooke, is blessedly short (77 minutes less seven minutes of end credits) and full of sex, violence, and jokes. The jokes sometimes land and sometimes don’t, but overall it’s a pleasant enough trifle. Not everything the Coens are involved in, separately or together, has to be a cinematic game-changer.

The dolls (the original title was Drive-Away Dykes) are buddies Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan). They get a car from a drive-away service and head to Tallahassee, not knowing there’s something in the trunk. Violent men hired by a powerful figure are after this something, for reasons I should let the movie tell you. Jamie, a lascivious sort, and Marian, who brings a Henry James novel with her, are generally the kind of diametrically opposed friends you only meet in B-movies. But Coen never pretends this is anything but a B-movie. Full of psychedelic scene transitions that recall the knockout daydreams in The Big Lebowski, it’s informed by any number of exploitation flicks of the ‘70s, though I feel sure none of those had references to The Europeans. 

The movie is all over the place — its tone is the ‘70s, but it’s set in 1999 for some reason, and sports some anachronisms like someone saying women can marry each other in Massachusetts (they couldn’t until 2004). A small dog is treated somewhat cavalierly (though not cruelly, thankfully), its only purpose being an excuse to get Jamie’s ex (Beanie Feldstein, funny as usual) on her trail. The terrific character actor Bill Camp scores every time as the drive-away manager Curlie, who’s sort of the comedic flip side of the elderly gas-station attendant who almost loses the coin toss in No Country for Old Men. As often happens in Coen movies, the desperate criminals are ruinously stupid, and their quarry is only innocent in comparison. Stars Pedro Pascal and Matt Damon drop in briefly, adding to the tapestry.

It may also be simplistic to imagine that Coen came up with the knockabout male crime stuff while Tricia Cooke (who identifies as queer; she and Coen have an open marriage) handled the lesbian stuff. Certainly the scenes inside various lesbian bars (an endangered species these days) were informed by someone who’s been there. Apparently “basement parties” are or were a thing; Jamie and Marian find themselves at one such shindig hosted by a women’s soccer team, and are invited to another. The South in 1999, presumably, was a lava pool of activity for like-minded young women to pursue glory or humiliation. In this universe, men mostly exist to be laughable or menacing (Colman Domingo holds up the “menacing” portion as imposingly as he did in @Zola). This is the kind of movie where Beanie Feldstein comes to the rescue, gun blazing.

Weirdly, of the two solo Coen efforts, I prefer Ethan’s sex-positive, consolateur-laden goof to Joel’s starkly artsy Shakespeare. (The two films couldn’t be less alike.) For one thing, it’s more fun, and fun is as rare nowadays as lesbian bars. The loosey-goosey Qualley and the stoically suffering Viswanathan are an engaging match; if their Jamie and Marian headlined a TV series I’d be there for it. If you don’t relish their company, you’re only with them for slightly north of an hour, and there are other strange divertissements throughout, such as Miley Cyrus’ bit as a character named Tiffany Plastercaster, or a heavy who emphasizes people skills as a path to persuasion (with dialogue you can imagine hearing, slightly tweaked, in Miller’s Crossing), or the funniest front-page headline since Arrested Development’s heyday. It’s silly and soft and bound for the cult-movie section, where it will find the following it lacks right now.

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