“Drive-Away Dolls” (2023) is Ethan Coen’s debut solo directorial feature without his brother, Joel. Set in 1999 and starting in Philadelphia, odd couple, lesbian friends, the uptight Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) and sexually adventurous Jamie (Margaret Qualley) decide to go on a road trip. To save money, they go to a drive-away company that Curley (Bill Camp) runs and ask to drive and deliver a car to Tallahassee, Florida. Because of the destination, Curley gives them the car meant for Goons Arliss (Joey Slotnick) and Flint (C.J. Wilson) who are tasked with delivering the trunk’s contents, which include a round box with a head and an aluminum briefcase only a skosh less mysterious than the one in “Pulp Fiction” (1994). The Chief (Colman Domingo) comes in to tidy up the mess while the Goons try to locate the two women. Will Marian loosen up, and will the Goons find them? And what is in the briefcase?
The previews make Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), Jamie’s ex and a cop, seem like the star of “Drive-Away Dolls” as she whales on Flint as Arliss tries to talk her down and get information. Arliss prides himself on his people skills and chides Flint for being a blunter instrument, all force, no finesse. The dueling pair are perfect foils to the leading ladies, the unyielding, rigid Marian as the protagonist versus the more loquacious and spontaneous Jamie. When the film introduces Marian, she is at work formally fending off advances from an opposite sex coworker while Jamie is enthusiastically working on turning Sukie into an ex. Qualley, who was impressive in “Sanctuary” (2022), carries the film with her laid-on-thick Texas accent. Viswanathan delivers a more subdued, grounded performance. All the characters feel more like archetypes than three dimensional characters.
Sex is almost its own character in “Drive-Away Dolls” and adds an oneiric quality to quotidian life. The film has mysterious, psychedelic interludes, which progressively make more sense as the denouement approaches, but people familiar with the actors in the cast may guess its significance before it is spelled out. Flashbacks to Marian’s childhood show that no one is too young to know their sexual orientation, and the film roots for Marian to move on from a dry spell that has lasted three years, four months, fourteen days and counting. It is a trope that if a woman just got laid, she would lighten up. Jamie tutors Marian on how to have casual, meaningless sex with mixed results that challenge their friendship.
Coen’s solo effort is not a solitary one. He cowrote “Drive-Away Dolls” with his wife, Tricia Cooke. I asked myself if lesbians, who are not a monolith, would resonate with the representation, but raise an eyebrow at the male conception of female liberation while depicting copious, amounts of anonymous sex as similarly depicted in “Poor Things” (2023) except with same sex partners. After finding out that Coen and Cooke, who is a lesbian, are married but have different partners, I just went with the flow and stopped being concerned. Every movie is not made for me. Coen and Cooke are being authentic in their fashion, not projecting a prurient fantasy on the big screen. There are only twenty-three lesbian bars in the US, and those bars are small in comparison to demand so a film that unfolds in lesbian spaces is a countercultural, twenty-fourth liminal space that reaches women without access or spatial limitations.
“Drive-Away Dolls” is the response to homophobic people with a sense of optics who may say, “I don’t mind gay people, I just wish that they wouldn’t…” insert word for any amount of visibility or existence. Coen and Cooke’s film take the opposite approach by focusing on lesbian sex. Coen and Cooke make a highly stylized film about a chaotic world that bends towards justice. For all its body humor and comic crime, this movie is political. As the women cross into Florida’s state border, Jamie says, “Lesbian, don’t let the sun go down on you here.” In another scene, the two proclaim themselves to be Democrats. Florida, crime, and Republican politics are conflated so the audience is not just rooting for two underdogs because of their gender and defenselessness, but because they are the have nots in terms of finances, especially as lesbians in a heteronormative world that decades later still seeks to erase their cultural existence. Great politics, but it makes for a plot that strains the suspension of disbelief. Coen and Cooke may have chosen to set their story in an earlier period, but not much has changed in terms of regressive politics today. It has gotten worse. After the 2016 election, many filmmakers made films with a message that denounced Presidon’t’s positions, and it feels as if Coen and Cooke are taking their stand but using humor and bawdy situations to disguise it.
Coen’s visuals are not subtle, and even a filmgoer who is not accustomed to looking for filmmaking technique may notice the use of wipe transitions, zooming in and shifting perspectives. Coen has been around the block longer than Eli Roth, but a few scenes featuring passive, emotionless statues symbolizing our country’s history acting as passive bystanders to tremendous violence feels reminiscent to “Thanksgiving” (2023). Is it coincidence that “Drive-Away Dolls” starts in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love and the site of the first mainstream movie about two sexless gay men in a legal drama? Coen and Cooke borrow from film noir without the usual accompanying cynicism of films like “Chinatown” (1974). This film’s protagonists are not hardboiled detectives thus suggesting Coen and Cooke are subverting or flipping the script, mocking politics as usual.
There is a moment when the two women worry about their morality since they chose practical benefits over saving the fate of the country, but “Drive-Away Dolls” sweeps in to make them guiltless through some Rube Goldbergian plot twists which have a very John Irving “A Prayer for Owen Meaney”-esque feel. It was amusing, but too theoretical and remote. It is the kind of movie where you say LOL without a lot of mirth, just appreciation.
While the eighty-four-minute runtime is appreciated in comparison to films that feel the need to be over two hours, but the first hour is a slog, “Drive-Away Dolls” is a tight, neat trick, but sometimes the proceedings get tidied up too conveniently. It feels criminal to have great character actors such as Pedro Pascal, Domingo or Camp appear for two seconds then ushered into the wings unceremoniously, blithely forgotten. Most characters feel like they exist to push the leads’ story forward without having their own existence except for Curley. The memory of that character lingers deliberately as if not to let the viewer off the hook in terms of the gravity of the situation.
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“Drive-Away Dolls” is an excuse to make the friends become lovers and committed lifetime partners. Regardless of whether the couple is same or opposite sex, this scenario feels less like a romantic happy ending and more like a ticking timebomb. Jamie is a cheater, and Marian could not stand her lingering eye when they were friends. We’re supposed to buy that Marian is such a woman of substance that she can change Jamie’s nature. If Jamie was James, I would not buy it or encourage such narratives. Cheaters cheat. I cannot suspend disbelief long enough to cosign.