Add Category
DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS ★★★★
(MA) 84 minutes
Back when the Coen brothers were an inseparable filmmaking duo, it was said they never disagreed about anything, which makes it all the more interesting to contemplate the paths they’ve taken since their professional split. A few years back, Joel Coen brought us a solemn, finely wrought, ever so slightly boring version of Macbeth, shot in stark black-and-white and starring his wife Frances McDormand opposite Denzel Washington.
Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan are on the run in the comedy Drive-Away Dolls.
Now Ethan Coen, the younger brother, has teamed up with his wife, Tricia Cooke, for the bawdy, cheerfully throwaway crime comedy Drive-Away Dolls. It’s based on a script they originally titled Drive-Away Dykes, in partial tribute to the sexploitation films of Russ Meyer.
Officially, this is Ethan’s solo directing debut: Cooke is credited as editor, the job she’s been doing most of her career. But they’ve said in interviews this was a collaboration on every front, no less than when Joel and Ethan worked together. They’ve also said that the portrayal of the 1990s lesbian bar scene is inspired by Cooke’s personal experience – which merits no particular comment, except it’s a further reminder that people have different sides.
Queerness, anyway, is the basis of the tall-tale plot, which begins in Philadelphia just before the turn of the millennium, home to Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) – pals with little in common beyond their orientation. Jamie is briskly direct in her approach to sex, falling into bed with any woman who strikes her fancy; Marian is a cautious bookworm who hasn’t been laid since 1996 when she broke up with a girlfriend working on Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign.
Geraldine Viswanathan (left), Margaret Qualley and Beanie Feldstein, who steals all of her scenes, in Drive-Away Dolls.
To help Marian break this drought, Jamie invites her friend to accompany her on a road trip to Florida. All well and good aside from a few encounters with suspicious red-state locals along the way, plus the mysterious suitcase hidden in the back of their car and the gangsters hired to retrieve it.
Drive-Away Dolls may not be a Coen brothers film, but it bears the signature of a Coen brother: indeed, it recalls the very earliest Coen productions, including those which Joel and Ethan co-wrote but didn’t direct, such as Sam Raimi’s Crimewave. Transparently low-budget, it compensates with off-kilter camera angles and aggressively zany scene transitions, as if the filmmakers weren’t highly respected industry veterans, but students trying out the professional equipment for the first time.