Whenever there’s a pair of critically and/or commercially successful movie-making siblings – the Farrellys, the Wachowskis, the Duplasses, the Wayans (Wayanses?), the Safdies, etc – one can’t help but wonder about the division of labour. Is one of the siblings more dominant than the other? Do they have their equal share of good ideas? Is there a special magic that happens when the two are together that makes their partnership more than a sum of its partners?
These questions become even more nagging when the pair consciously uncouples, as the Safdies did recently, and as the Coens have – temporarily at least – with their recent projects. Joel directed a stylish take on The Tragedy of Macbeth in 2021, with his wife Frances McDormand and Denzel Washington in the lead roles, while Ethan and his wife, the editor Tricia Cooke, made a well-received feature-length documentary about Jerry Lee Lewis. (Because of Directors Guide of America peccadillos, Ethan has usually been credited as producer on their joint projects, with Joel as director, though as all Coen Heads know, they co-direct their films, as well as co-editing under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes.)
Perhaps encouraged by the Jerry Lee Lewis experience, Ethan is now experimenting in dramatic-movie-making without Joel with Drive-Away Dolls, a high-energy caper-cum-road-movie that he co-wrote with Cooke, which comes out next week (and actually while it’s solo as far as the Coen brothers go, it sounds like Cooke was essentially his co-director). It stars a healthy smattering of big-name stars such as Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal in small roles, and talented of-the-moment types – Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan – in the main ones. It has music from Carter Burwell; the producers are long-time Coens collaborators Robert Graf and the fellows from Working Title. So far, so familiar.
As is the basic premise: kicking off in Philadelphia in 1999, Drive-Away Dolls is a screwball caper in which a couple of ordinary folks possessed of sub-ordinary levels of judgement embark on a mid-level hare-brained scheme. Little do they know that said hare-brained scheme will cause them inadvertently to tinker with the plans of a cabal of dead-eyed criminals, who will seek to stop them with any imaginatively violent means necessary. You’ve seen The Big Lebowski, right? And Fargo? And No Country for Old Men? So you get the Coensy gist, only this time, there’s a new element…. Lesbians!
Qualley and Viswanathan are the hapless innocents Jamie and Marian, friends who have different reasons for wanting to take on an odd-job of driving and delivering a car to Tallahassee, Florida. Jamie, a sexually liberated extrovert with the can-do attitude and chatty Southern delivery of Sandy Cheeks, the aquanaut squirrel in Spongebob Squarepants, has burned her bridges in the claustrophobic lesbian scene at home and needs to get laid elsewhere; in a memorable exchange, as Jamie moves out of the apartment she has been sharing with her disgruntled ex, Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), they debate the ownership of a wall-mounted dildo. Marian, on the other hand, hasn’t burned any bridges in the claustrophobic lesbian scene at home – in fact, she’d rather curl up with a Henry James novel – and thus, at least as Jamie sees it, needs to get laid elsewhere.
Unbeknownst to Jamie and Marian, the car they’ve agreed to deliver has a suitcase in the trunk – the contents of which it would be a spoiler to reveal – and a bickering hoodlum duo (Joey Slotnick and CJ Wilson), at the bidding of their enigmatic boss (Colman Domingo), is sent after them to retrieve it. A chase begins, though in a juxtaposition the Coens have mined to successful comic effect plenty of times before, neither party fully submits to the conventions of the genre in which the other traditionally exists (in this case, perhaps, the romcom and the crime-thriller).
There are other genres in the mix here, too, most obviously the sexploitation and grindhouse movies of the 1960s and 70s. It’s full of dick jokes and cutely smutty one-liners (“put a meter on her pussy and we could all retire”), plus screwing of all kinds, including a dramatic early death involving a waiter’s friend to the jugular. It almost feels uptight – nay, frigid! – not to roll with the rollicking mood; but what if you just don’t – just can’t! – find it funny?
Qualley, an incredibly versatile, magnetic actor, certainly gives a committed performance, and Viswanathan does her best to give the film a more empathetic core. Slotnick and Wilson, as the goons, prove perfectly capable, though the shadow of Steve Buscemi’s Carl Showalter and Peter Stomare’s Gaer Grimsrud, the iconic duo from Fargo, ultimately looms too large. The cameos, including Pascal, Damon and Miley Cyrus, are eye-catchingly distracting and superficial (which of course they’re supposed to be, but still, where does that leave us?). The main problem though, is that a dildo joke is still a dildo joke, and sometimes, when you throw them at the wall, they just don’t stick.
Of course Drive-Away Dolls will bring out the Coens (or Coen) enthusiasts who are eager to defend its clever subversion of cinematic genres and commentary on societal and personal dysfunctions, all of which are no doubt true. And the Coens are rumoured to be back together anyway, so perhaps this will be less a new direction, more a whimsical aside. Perhaps it will even gain cult status in later years, as Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! – about a group of go-go dancers on the rampage across the desert – eventually managed to do, after flopping at the box office in 1965. But for now, without the kitschifying effects of several decades to help it, Drive-Away Dolls feels disposably thin.
'Drive-Away Dolls' is in UK and Irish cinemas from 15 March
Miranda Collinge is the Deputy Editor of Esquire, overseeing editorial commissioning for the brand. With a background in arts and entertainment journalism, she also writes widely herself, on topics ranging from Instagram fish to psychedelic supper clubs, and has written numerous cover profiles for the magazine including Cillian Murphy, Rami Malek and Tom Hardy.
