Drive-Away Dolls is the first feature film that Ethan Coen has directed without brother Joel’s involvement at some stage. Playing it safe, he’s decided to go for a homage to the films he first made with Joel back in those Blood Simple/Raising Arizona years.
While this isn’t a bad thing in itself, it does mean what’s on offer is familiar – fruits, nuts and flakes, pantomime death, cartoonish visuals, a lot of the verbals, low shots down corridors, villains falling out with each other and what have you.
It’s, you know, OK, though neither Blood Simple nor Raising Arizona need worry and it raises again a question that’s always hovered in my mind, as to whether Ethan and Joel’s movies were 50/50 joint ventures, as the joint billing suggested, or whether one brother or other was generally speaking the presiding eminence.
It’s a road movie set in 1999 (so the year after The Big Lebowski and before O Brother, Where Art Thou?) following two lesbians – Drive-Away Dykes was the titled mooted when this last nearly got made in 2007 – on a journey in a car they’re delivering to Tallahassee, unaware that there’s something very valuable on board and that they’re being pursued by a couple of bad guys who want it back.
The gals are Jamie, loquacious and unrestrained, and Marian, prim and quiet – an odd-couple whore/madonna coupling. The guys are Arliss and Flint, the over-chatty one and the dumb as mud one. For the young women it’s a story of increasing intimacay, for the older men, one of falling out, eventually disastrously.
Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan play Jamie and Marian, the former doing her best with an over-written part, the latter unable to shine (as she did in Blockers and The Beanie Bubble) because Marian doesn’t have very much to say or do. Joey Slotnick and CJ Wilson fare slightly better (but then Coen bad guys are usually interesting) as Arliss and Flint. Though with both couplings there’s the distinct sense of the same-olds.
There’s also a sense of dad trying to show he’s down with the kids – we had sex back in my day too, you know – with references to ladies getting it on, dildos, masturbation and all sorts of moist practices that might once have been mined for shocks and/or laughs but now seem almost routine in the era of unrestrained streaming.
But it looks great and Ethan Coen shows he’s still got his eye for a gaudy image and a funny edit. There are also some very nice supporting performances. Beanie Feldstein as Jamie’s former squeeze, a cop who doesn’t quite get in on the action as much as you might wish. Bill Camp as Curlie, the owner of Curlie’s Drive-Away – again, you’re left wanting more. And there’s Miley Cyrus, who appears in a series of strange psychedelic cutaway sequences (set to Funkadelic’s epically out-there Maggot Brain) which seem detached from the rest of the movie but in fact eventually explains it all. And Pedro Pascal, who dies spectacularly (and funnily) in the pre-credits sequence and whose bodiless head remains as a Maguffin (and possibly as a metaphor, if you’re missing Joel’s presence).
That theory about the Coens – was it Ethan who did the wackadoodle elements, and set the agenda most obviously in Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski and Hail Caesar!, while Joel was more seriously minded and called most of the shots on Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There (which he directed alone but co-wrote with Ethan) and Inside Llewyn Davis?
It is probably a bit more complicated than that but on the evidence of Drive-Away Dolls, it’s the familiar jokey pastiche side of the Coen equation we’re getting, but without the twist that gives it that Coen edge.
Apparently it’s the first in a trio of lesbian road movies Ethan is writing with wife Tricia Cooke. Next up, Margaret Qualley rides again in Honey Don’t!, another Cooke/Coen joint effort. Who wants to bet it’ll never get made.
Drive-Away Dolls – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
