The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D
Drive-Away Dolls is the first solo directorial effort from Ethan Coen, one half of the legendary filmmaking duo the Coen Brothers. When Ethan combined with Joel Coen, the Coen Brothers brought us such films as Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, The Big Lebowski and No Country for Old Men. The brothers semi-retired a few years ago, saying that dealing with studio executives had become onerous to the point that they no longer enjoyed the filmmaking process. Ethan apparently became bored, though, and made the questionable decision to return with this unfunny slog. The legacy of Drive-Away Dolls will likely be minimal except that it proves that some pairs just can’t work without each other.
Set in 1999, this is the story of two lesbians named Jamie and Marian (played, respectively, by Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan) who want to take a trip to Tallahassee, Florida. They go to a drive-away service (which I had never heard of before, but they arrange to transport cars on long one-way trips) and take a gig driving a car to Tallahassee. However, the car was supposed to be picked up by the mob and contains a decapitated head and a mysterious briefcase in the trunk. The mob isn’t particularly happy about the mix-up and a couple of henchmen are sent after the girls to retrieve the hidden items. With that setup, the film becomes a road trip movie as the girls travel to Florida with the mob in pursuit.
I’ll say this: the movieis mercifully short at only 84 minutes. While I like road trip movies and the setup is decent enough to work, Drive-Away Dolls doesn’t so much feel like a Coen movie as it does a late 90s- early 2000s knockoff of the Coen Brothers or Quentin Tarantino. We have quirky leads, we have bumbling hitmen having philosophical conversations about their work, hell we even have an enigmatic briefcase straight out of Pulp Fiction. But while the Coen Brothers or Tarantino in their prime could combine those elements into cinematic gold, this movie feels terribly inauthentic. It feels like a lesser filmmaker trying to make something quirky and cool and failing miserably, like an amateur guitar player trying to sound like Eddie Van Halen. There is nothing fresh or shocking about Drive-Away Dolls and there sure as hell isn’t anything funny about it. The late 90s setting is fitting in the sense that this feels like a throwaway crime thriller that would have been released straight-to-video in 1999 and then promptly forgotten. That wouldn’t be the most damning description for an effort from an inexperienced filmmaker, but this is actually made by Ethan fucking Coen.
The biggest problem is our terribly-written lead characters, who I described as being lesbians because that is pretty much their only notable character trait. The working title for the movie was Drive-Away Dykes and that is a much more fitting description. You know how you can determine if someone is a vegan by just waiting five seconds because they will tell you? In that span of time, these girls would have told you their sexual preference about ten times. Their only topic of conversation is to discuss that they are lesbians. Everything that they do and everywhere they go revolves around the fact that they are lesbians. That doesn’t make them interesting or edgy; it makes them insufferably fucking boring. I have several lesbian friends and they are capable of discussing other topics. We talk about movies and sports and politics (and to really throw Hollywood a curveball: they aren’t all Democrats). They are actually three-dimensional people not entirely defined by their preferred bedroom activities, unlike the characters in this movie that I hesitate to even refer to a caricatures. “Caricatures” would be an aspirational term for this level of writing.
Actually, I shouldn’t go that far. In addition to being lesbians, they do each have another character trait. Get a load of this: one is an extroverted free spirit and the other is a quiet introvert that likes to read! This is it, folks, the first such pairing of these character types in cinematic history! The quiet one is always reading The Europeans by Henry James so that we, as an audience, can understand that she’s a super serious and intellectual person. I mean, the book has a portrait on the cover! That’s shorthand for a super serious book and anyone reading it must be super smart. If only someone could get them to open their hearts to the world beyond the written page. Seriously, who the fuck wrote this? A fucking fifth grader? Oh, it was co-written by Ethan Coen. Goddamn it.
The performances are generally fine, it’s just that nobody has anything to work with. Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan both seem like they may be capable of being charismatic leads, but its difficult to say with certainty with this material (I don’t think I’ve ever seen Qualley in anything before, but I know Viswanathan from The Broken Hearts Gallery and that doesn’t have the most inspiring of scripts either). They are trying to be funny, the film just won’t let them. This is largely a two-person show, so you will be disappointed if you go into it expecting much from Pedro Pascal and Matt Damon, both of whom have appearances so brief that you could miss them with an ill-timed trip to the bathroom. Oddly, I was listening to a well-known podcast discuss this film recently and they made a point of not mentioning that Matt Damon is in the movie because they didn’t want to spoil the surprise; guys, he’s in the fucking trailer.
I haven’t even gotten into the film’s childish politics or the use of random psychedelic interludes to pad the running time. Suffice it to say that Drive-Away Dolls is a massive disappointment from a filmmaker that was once (and recently) considered one of the greatest in Hollywood. If you want a girl-power road trip movie, then stick with Thelma and Louise, which feels far more like a Coen Brothers movie than this does. If you are looking for a funny, bizarre, trippy lesbian road trip movie, then you have a mighty specific request, but watch Freeway 2: Confessions of a Trickbaby instead. It aint great, but it’s a lot more entertaining than this.
Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive-Away_Dolls#/media/File:Driveaway_dolls_poster.png
