Review: Drive-Away Dolls

Director:  Ethan Coen

Stars:  Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, Beanie Feldstein

You’ll find the fingerprints of many a prior Coen Brothers movie within this side offering from Ethan (before the siblings reunite for next year’s slated horror film). They’re visible in a pair of bumbling henchmen who’re pure Fargo. They’re imprinted in the old-timey patter favoured by Margaret Qualley’s Jamie, a ratatat cadence that smacks of H.I. from Raising Arizona spliced with Everett from O Brother, Where Art Thou? And one might even use these markers to try and extrapolate which individual jokes from their arsenal of established classics originated with Ethan, so evident is his own sensibility all over Drive-Away Dykes Dolls.

But, in doing, so one might overlook the other important presence brought to the fore by this deliciously doolally detour; that of Ethan’s wife and editor on this offering – Tricia Cooke. The candidly bisexual co-author of Drive-Away Dolls, Cooke brings unique flavours to the mixture found nowhere else in the brothers’ work together. For one thing, this smart and silly excursion is sexy. It’s horny. Randy, even. Chock full of climaxes, anonymous clinches and all manner of sexual… equipment. More than enough to make Burn After Reading‘s Harry Pfarrer blush.

And blush he might, because Drive-Away Dolls is all about feminine desire. Explicitly girl-on-girl lust and longing. It’s also – whisper it – a little bit of a love story, and it allows itself to be more sincerely than any of Ethan’s prior colabs with Joel.

Cooke, it appears, has as much love for a shaggy-dog story as both brothers, and Drive-Away Dolls is a decidedly throwaway gesture; a queer comedic road movie which is fuelled by its own irrelevancy. It doesn’t have a political drum to bang, particularly (though there are plenty of satirical sideswipes). Indeed, this script has been rattling around since the turn of the millennium precisely because it’s so irreverent with its queerness, refusing to soapbox it into an issue to be reckoned with, overcome or accepted.

Looking to skip Philly for a while having worn out her welcome with her cop girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), terminal horn-dog Jamie coaxes her buttoned-down friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) along for the ride, running a ‘drive-away’ car down to a new owner in Tallahassee, Florida. Along the way Jamie hopes to get Marian laid, sensing in her a long overdue need to unwind and get back into the swing of her life.

What the women don’t know is that there’s a prized suitcase (and more) stashed in the back of the vehicle, and that a debonair character known only as ‘The Chief’ (Colman Domingo) has been tasked with reacquiring it on behalf of his mysterious employer. A twist on the bag-full-o-money routine that underpins several Coen Brothers pictures, what unfurls here starts to take a similar shape to David Lynch’s Wild at Heart – to wit, a sexed-up chase film that zips casually down the Eastern seaboard one motel and dive bar at a time.

The marketing and – to a certain extent – the picture itself has the no-stakes vibe of a late ’60s/early ’70s exploitation movie, and in interview Cooke has mentioned drive-in titles like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Bad Girls Go to Hell as examples that she had in mind at one point or another. Neither touchstone really manifests in the finished article. While some of Cooke’s delirious flashbacks and psychedelic scene transitions retain a pronounced hippie flavour and even pepper in some scratched-up Super 8 stylings, the film retains a late ’90s setting (contemporary at the time of those initial drafts) and feels more like a lost article from that decade’s cycle of cine-literate indie curios. With that in mind, the all-grrl double act feels like a flick-knife to the balls of the era’s glut of machismo-inclined Tarantino rip-offs. Maybe even a rejoinder to QT’s output directly. Mercifully, it has a voice all of its own.

And what a voice. Qualley’s intense patter as Jamie is initially a little disarming, but acclimatize and its the only hurdle to overcome in a brisk 80 minute yarn that cruises on an expressed desire to create some good times. You’re never too far from a silly moment or nifty bit of word play. While the peripheries are peppered with enough oddball characters to keep Noah Hawley busy come Fargo season six, the core of the film is totally Qualley and the quite wonderful Viswanathan.

What starts out as an odd-couple comedy slowly starts morphing into something slightly more complex, and as it does so Drive-Away Dolls shifts gears from a riff on the popularised myth that lesbianism is one long free-ride of casual hook-ups, maturing into the realisation that a genuine, well-rooted connection – like any kind of relationship – is the key to the long haul. While several steps away from a fully-fledged romance, the shift in dynamic between Jamie and Marian is as much the story as the contents of their accidentally-pilfered briefcase (though the contents and their relevancy are neither a disappointment nor immaterial).

If your expectation is something approximating the mid-’00s Grindhouse flurry, you may be setting yourself up for disappointment. Drive-Away Dolls isn’t nearly as nasty as either those flicks or the flicks that inspired them. But if you’re hoping for a dopey farce that’s (at least) a match for mid-tier Coen capers like Burn After Reading or Intolerable Cruelty, this lightweight excursion will do you well. It does feel flung out of time, but in the sense that studio pictures of this size and sensibility are nigh-on impossible to find these days, and seeing something of this quality in a cinema carries a romanticism all of its own. I encourage the inclined to make the trip.

There’s also something intrinsically funny in the discovery that Joel went off to make an austere, monochrome Shakespeare adaptation, and Ethan came home with this.

Thanks Tricia.