Drive-Away Dolls (Coen, 2024)

Written by Tom Augustine.

For a litmus test to determine whether Drive-Away Dolls is for you, a viewer needn’t look far past the first scene. A nervous handler of a mysterious briefcase (Pedro Pascal) is pursued by a villainous barman, who stabs him in an alleyway with a corkscrew. Jutting out of his neck, the handler attempts to remove the device by twisting it out as one might a cork, howling in pain all along. The stage is set – we’re in for comedy of the screwball nature, heavy on the screw. If this isn’t enough to either seal the deal or make you walk out, just wait until the first of many scene transitions executed by editor (and co-writer) Tricia Cooke, wife of Ethan Coen. Drive-Away Dolls doesn’t just employ scene wipes like you might see in a Star Wars film – rather, scenes crash into each other, flipping or twisting or squeezing the past scene out, Looney Tunes sound effects and all. The name of the game is irreverence, a fast and loose play on the tropes of the romantic comedy that also cribs liberally from the scuzzy, gleefully lascivious exploitation flicks of Russ Meyer, he of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill and Super Vixens. It’s a certain level of context that the modern viewer may not be acquainted with, and may struggle to get in the groove of if encountering Dolls unprepared. Indeed, the audience I watched the film with, a packed screening full of Coen lovers likely expecting a new Lebowski or Burn After Reading, sat through the film in mostly disapproving silence. It’s fair to say that Drive-Away Dolls won’t be everyone’s cup of whiskey. 

For one thing, the film is outwardly, gleefully horny. And queer. Set in the grimy lesbian club scene of a pre-Y2K America, it’s a film that attempts to repurpose the exhibitionist qualities of Meyer’s work through a resolutely queer perspective. Not that there haven’t been queer and feminist readings of the films of Russ Meyer – far from it – but Drive-Away Dolls feels refreshingly unfettered by the social pressures of the era Meyer was working in. It’s a film that is out about its outness. For a film that’s strikingly caught between a throwback and a meditation on modern-day sexuality, it is also charmingly fearless about its sensuality. Sex is a big part of Drive-Away Dolls, and the film is defiantly matter-of-fact about showing sex and, of course, being sexy. For some modern, sex-on-screen averse audiences (the puritans), it may prove a little too much. It’s this uniquely unabashed approach that sets Drive-Away Dolls somewhat apart – there’s an audaciousness to the work that likely stems from the confidence a filmmaker who has Fargo and No Country for Old Men under his belt might feel. 

For his first solo effort sans brother Joel, the great filmmaker Ethan Coen directs this deliriously wacky oddity, a film that hearkens back to the Seventies exploitation films of Russ Meyer and John Waters. Part crime caper, part soft-hearted romance, part devilish sex comedy, the film is too muddled and haphazard to endorse outright, yet too idiosyncratic, exuberantly queer and endearingly lewd to dismiss.

In Drive-Away Dolls (originally known by the vastly superior title Drive-Away Dykes), two young lesbians, different from each other in almost every way, agree to link up on a car trip to Tallahassee, Florida for a fresh start. These two are played by rising stars Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan – Qualley as the free-spirited, rootin’-tootin’ Southern lass Jamie and Viswanathan as her exceedingly buttoned-up partner in crime, office girl Marian, pent-up from a long stint with no sex. Qualley, on a fast-track to superstardom, is here channelling past Coen heroes like Nicolas Cage’s H.I. McDunnough, the woebegone hero of Raising Arizona, or George Clooney’s slick dunce Ulysses from O Brother, Where Art Thou? It’s an uneasy turn for Qualley – she never entirely settles into the more caustic, antic elements of the character, finding a better groove in the sweetness of the growing relationship between Jamie and Marian. The real standout, though, is Viswanathan, who holds the film’s surprisingly gentle emotional core in her hands. It’s a genuinely fantastic performance – a character so brittle and ill at ease that when she’s faced with her own desires they bubble up unbearably to the surface, as in a quite hilarious digression involving a free-loving women’s soccer team. It ought to be a star-making vehicle for Viswanathan, a wonderful actress who has shone in films like Blockers and shows like Miracle Workers, but hasn’t yet broken into the big time. Drive-Away Dolls at last gives her something to chew on – and she makes a meal of it.

Where Drive-Away Dolls excels is in the warmth and sweetness of this core relationship. Amid all the hubbub surrounding them, the attraction that emerges first tentatively, then swells into a crescendo, is a genuine delight to behold. There’s a lovely scene toward the end of the film between the two players that makes exquisite use of a champagne glass and the reflections of light refracting through it on a motel ceiling. It’s telling, then, that there’s a noticeable sense of reluctance in the film to drift away from this element of the story. There’s an odd unhurriedness to the film, a general lack of urgency that works in favour of the film’s central relationship, but against the propulsiveness of its crime caper storyline. Indeed, the machinations of that aspect of the plot feel like the element Coen and Cooke are least interested in – the plot doesn’t even really start moving until a good third of the film has elapsed. When the girls finally come into possession of the mysterious suitcase, a panoply of characters are drawn into the mix, including a number of big name actors in walk-on cameo roles – Matt Damon, Miley Cyrus, Colman Domingo, the aforementioned Pascal. Some of the detectable Coenisms emerge here, but they feel muted, less intricate than the work of the Brothers combined. A subplot involving a pair of fixers hunting down the case (played by Joey Slotnick and C.J. Wilson) feels mostly like a pale retread of the same relationship captured by Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare’s kidnappers in Fargo. This isn’t to say that there aren’t laughs to be had or intriguing visual avenues to barrel down – a hilariously trippy series of dream sequences involving a hippy chick played by Cyrus comes to mind – but they generally lack the wallop of the Coens’ finest work. It’s also worth noting that the conditions of modern filmmaking do not favours to Dolls’ intentions to evoke the grit of the Seventies – much of the film suffers for the digital sheen of the camerawork – the visuals are so technically clean that it lacks the handmade, personal feel of Waters’ and Meyer’s best.

Much has been made about the ‘parting’ of brothers Joel and Ethan, responsible for some of the most important works of cinema of the late 20th Century and early 21st, and it’s been fascinating to see what paths the two have gone down in the time since their split. Joel made the handsome and remote The Tragedy of Macbeth, while Ethan has gone in about as different a direction as you could go. Both films are certainly not without merit, and it’s clear that both are eager to find new shades to their work that define them beyond the films they’ve made together. Indeed, in Drive-Away Dolls it is the moments that feel most influenced by past Coen efforts that feel the most hackneyed and underfed. It’s intriguing and welcome to see Ethan embrace punk queer cinema as an avenue for exploration, an entirely unexpected route that draws a line back to Gregg Araki and John Waters. The result is a film that pledges fealty to that history but also attempts to carve its own odd and often delightful path. Perhaps most refreshing of all is the overwhelming sense that, at a fleet 84 minutes, Drive-Away Dolls is something of a trifle, and enjoyably brisk and low-key work from an acknowledged master more than happy to doodle in the margins for a while. That even those doodles deserve to be put up in the finest galleries in town is a real testament.

Drive-Away Dolls is in cinemas now.

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