2024
Directed by Ethan Coen
Written by Tricia Cooke and Ethan Coen
I don't know what caused the Coen brothers to break up, but, if I may tip my hand here with a supposition that I do, obviously, mean as a joke, maybe it was Drive-Away Dolls. I mean, of course it wasn't: they'd amicably set off sometime in the early 2020s to pursue different projects, with Joel, the elder brother (somehow this makes sense though they're both senior citizens), along with his wife Frances McDormand, pursuing 2021's The Tragedy of Macbeth, one of if not the single least characteristic film to come with the "Coen" imprimatur, though not for that reason unworthy of the name; a horror/fantasy-tinged and death-haunted Shakespeare adaptation, indebted heavily to the legacy of early 20th century expressionism while still experimenting with what "expressionism" could mean in an era of digital photography, Joel's film probably would've made any top ten I would have put together for 2021, had 2021 not been so heavily compromised by COVID that a top ten would've been pointless. The Tragedy of Macbeth is also, aggravatingly, one of those movies locked away from all prying eyes forevermore on Apple TV+. Equally aggravatingly, I just found out it made less than $600,000 in theaters, which means that the screening I attended somehow comprised about 1/500th of its entire gross; the upshot is that Joel has no future plans of which I am aware, though, again, he is awfully old, and maybe he just wanted to do his Macbeth—maybe even because it was uncharacteristic—before he retired or died.
I am digressing already. Ethan Coen, meanwhile, along with his wife, frequent Coens editor Tricia Cooke, pursued this*, and it is somehow vastly more characteristic (the easiest comparison is The Big Lebowski though the actual plot is No Country For Old Men, if only Josh Brolin had stolen from the cartel a collection of inculpatory dildos) while also being at least in the running for the most disappointing Coen Bros., or Coen Brother, film I ever saw. Thus the natural experiment the brothers have conducted, though I suppose any scientist would prefer to have more data points, seems to want you to slot them into most reductive stereotypes of themselves: Joel is the one with the most concern for the formal precision the brothers are known for, as well as for the sense of nihilism and misanthropic contempt that is so frequently the mode that Coen Bros. movies take on; Ethan is the one who likes the shaggy storytelling and the sense of absurdism, which can often dovetail with a nihilistic worldview as well as misanthropic contempt, though we would have to assume that Ethan's the one who has ensured that so many of his and his brother's movies are comedies. I did not, however, say with that, "Ethan is the funny one." Or we could consider the respective Mrs. Coens: McDormand is a great actress giving a great, controlled performance that has thought about the needs of her film and fully lives up to her part of that collaboration; Cooke is apparently an unhinged maniac editor who, outside of Joel's influence and with her husband's enthusiastic connivance, is finally free to impose the most tasteless scene transitions you've ever seen in your life, like the transitions of a late 80s music video or an early 90s sitcom aimed at tweens (the screen rotates and flies around at one point; I'm not sure if I only imagined the sound effect). I feel like it would be wildly mean and significantly overstate my case, but I almost want to say the Coens' experiment retrospectively explains why, when the DGA refused all those years to allow the brothers equal credit on their movies, Joel was the one who took the title "director."
Okay, a lot of it's out of my system now. The movie isn't even exactly bad, although it's a near-run thing; it's mostly good on the basis of its dominant co-lead, Margaret Qualley, playing a sentient rural Texan accent who's taken on the role of the story's chaos agent. The movie is not set in rural Texas; if it were, it would explain how Jamie (Qualley) is actually friends with Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), a dweeb and square, because the only reason it ever provides is "they are both lesbians." It starts in Philadelphia, though, so I don't know, though it takes place in 1999 for reasons that may boil down to "cellphones would break the plot" because the movie very rarely otherwise acts like it is 1999, and in several salient moments explicitly pins it to "sometime well on the other side of the 21st century," notably in a straight-up "we got queer history wrong" line right at the end, though the much more annoying one was the Visa ad in the middle of the movie with a Pride-themed card ("rainbow card") that I would be pleased to know existed in 1999 but I'm pretty sure did not, and I am fairly sure did not provide some percentage of purchases or whatever as donations to transgender charities, in 1999. In any case, the real short version is "it's a road movie," the slightly longer version is that Jamie earns the ire of her cop girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein) by way of infidelity and gets thrown out (one of Cooke's goofier transitions sells a domestic violence gag, it's tolerably amusing in execution, I guess), so Jamie decides to up sticks, teaming up with platonic friend Marian who's already planning on heading down to Tallahassee, and effectively taking over the entire trip, convincing Marian to do a "drive-away" along with her—this being a sort of temporary pseudo-gig where you drive a car intended for delivery to its destination, securing free-ish transportation in exchange for the service.
What they don't know, but we do, is that they've accidentally inserted themselves into a criminal operation, unwittingly impersonating the pair of men only credited as "goon" (not even goon no. 1 and goon no. 2, a joke, though Wikipedia gives them names so I assume dialogue must somewhere; Joey Slotnick and C.J. Wilson, respectively). The goons, the henchmen of a criminal chief (Colman Domingo), were supposed to drive a certain car down to Tallahassee; in its trunk, under the spare tire, is the package previously wrested from the control of a mysterious man who'd evidently sealed his own doom with it (Pedro Pascal), given that the forces the goons represent killed him for it; the trunk also contains a hatbox with his head in it, for what I believe will turn out to be no reason. And guess who will eventually be compelled to look in that trunk, under the spare tire? Jamie and Marian see their opportunity, and, much like whatever Josh Brolin's character in No Country For Old Men was named, they interpose themselves at great peril into a criminal conspiracy that reaches at least as far as one of Florida's senators (Matt Damon).
This genre plot is an excuse and honestly maybe not even a necessary one, nor even a useful one, and arguably just Coen (inclusive) autopilot: to begin, and without spoiling anything, it is extremely stupid; the way it intersects with, well, anything the movie is about feels immensely disconnected, and given the nature of the package, it really feels like Coen and Cooke must've been intentionally not connecting it, but were too enamored with the crassness of it to abandon it, and came up with a grandiose goofball explanation for it. (Honestly, if you're not going to use this to do the Republican Senator covering up his enormous homosexuality, what are you doing at all?) If I were willing to be reckless, I might even say that the impetus for the movie is that Coen or Cooke learned about the existence and work of Cynthia Plaster Caster, whom I only learned was real because my wife told me so, and they just had to do something, anything with that; it's not as much of a logical leap as it absolutely feels, I guess. But then, that's because I would also say, were I reckless, that the movie comes off like Coen and Cooke wrote it soup-to-nuts while high and refused to change anything, and I wouldn't only say this because I've been primed by a weird series of detached psychedelic interludes. These eventually get kind of an explanation, albeit not one that gels with any sense of subjectivity the movie may have, but in the meantime they kind of come off like a stylistic armpit fart, and possibility a way to wrench this underrealized movie up to 84 minutes, something I'd praise in any 2024 film, if it weren't somehow still too long for its material.
It distracts from any "actual story," anyway, which is pretty much just these temperamental opposites learning to like each other, or more, and I'm not down on this too much, though in another one of those "this 84 minute movie is fucking padded?" fillips that Coen and Cooke are getting up to, we get an "origin story" of Marian's lesbianism (radically unnecessarily; it's not even the origin story of her uptightness about being a sexually active, or rather sexually inactive, lesbian), time which might have been better spent providing an origin story for why Marian abides being in the same room let alone on the same twenty hour car ride as Jamie. Still, the comic crime caper does mean that we don't really get very much of "a road movie" (the only local color in the whole film is a whimsy about an all-lesbian college soccer team that becomes a tightly-regimented smooching circle), yet it starts up so late that it doesn't really feel like it's even the thing that's binding Jamie and Marian together. What it winds up being is an alternating series of scenes that are basically the same: Jamie and Marian's at least have some modicum of forward romcom momentum; they're interspersed with Slotnick and Wilson's parallel interplay as they chase the girls down (they basically recapitulate the dynamic in a masculine register and hence more overtly antagonistic towards one another), and for a few of these scenes, I even thought that Slotnick and Wilson's cutaways were more successful than the A-plot, with Slotnick's goon being garrulous and loose and personable, and Wilson's goon being a stick-in-the-mud proceduralist (like I said, "it recapitulates"), except by the second, and noticeably by the third, they're almost literally just repeating their dialogue exchanges from the first.
So Jamie and Marian are better, sort of. It's mainly Qualley, who is emphasizing kinder and more empathetic dimensions than are ever quite evident in the screenplay—the screenplay's Jamie is domineering to the point that without this leavening, she'd be genuinely unlikeable, and even with it, she's still so socially and sexually pushy I'd have some trouble saying I did like her—and Qualley's reasonably funny, with the showier role, mainly by letting the accent and the Coenesque "shut up, Donnie" dialogue flow out of her rather than attempting to force it. (It's a strategy of the actor that's entirely the opposite of her character's, oddly enough.) Viswanathan is overplaying her curt, clipped deliveries as a straight-up pill of a straightman, kind of annoyingly so, and also so brittle and glasslike and monotone that she overcooks the romantic tension into some manner of neurosis, one that makes you more worried about her emotional safety than I think is good for it; it would completely fracture the movie if Qualley were not doing everything possible within this screenplay's limits to adjust to Viswanathan's fragile energy. Their romantic chemistry is not bad, though I guess I really am spending this entire review harping on Cooke's editing (not that I assume Coen gave her good footage): this is some very badly-cut sex, and even allowing for the awkwardness of oral sex in a still-just-an-R-rated movie (likewise allowing for this being an "erotic"-or-whatever movie where only tertiary players have been contracted for nudity), "sex onscreen" should probably put both performers' faces or least both performers' heads in the same frame at some point before it's over. And the result is one honestly confusing orgasm and an even more confusing follow-up—these are, like, ancient professionals, so I wonder if it's just intentional but miscalibrated—but regardless, I thought for a solid minute that follow-up had to be a dream sequence. (The later shower scene gets the actual job of non-pornographic sex done better, basically thanks to a bunch of frosted glass and steam; but the earlier one is almost like trying to do pornography without any of porn's formal advantages.)
Most of it doesn't work, but I didn't laugh so rarely I'd call it entirely unsuccessful; some of that laughter was a bit despite myself, mainly because the movie is so damned messy and undisciplined that it has the ability to surprise you pretty frequently, though this is also what's bad about it. (And in many respects it's bad without any particular compensation: Ari Wegner's photography, without necessarily delivering any terrible individual images, is so inconsistent, often in ways unmoored to the narrative—swinging from sharp stylized colorfulness to flat hazy naturalism to warped, paranoid lensing to, during the "lesbian origin story" flashbacks, what I imagine an insurance commercial on the subject of voyeurism would look like—that it further addles a movie that really didn't need any extra addling.) But that's kind of Drive-Away Dolls. It's an overbearing movie in basically every respect, from its bizarre and random impositions of style, to its secondary cast of belligerent assholes, to its related insistence on recycling every scene that it's identified as funny until the joke is grating instead, to its prime-mover co-protagonist who has to have two orgies refused, and make the target of her affections cry during her second offer, before she manages to think about changing tactics—hell, even the narrative elisions it makes (and I haven't covered all of the important events that fall into an offscreen space!) are somehow overbearing—and all the way down to the maguffin itself. It's not devoid of pleasure, but it's not nearly as much fun as its principals seemed to have had making the dumb thing.
Score: 6/10
*Drive-Away Dolls is only Ethan's first solo narrative film. His first solo film, period, was a documentary, 2022's Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble In Mind, which I expect is self-describing.
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