Stay Away, Dolls
'Drive-Away Dolls' is an embarrassingly-awful caper comedy from the once-great Ethan Coen.
Drive-Away Dolls is terrible, and not in a funny way. It’s the kind of movie that is so bad you know it’s going to be awful before the first scene is even over, the kind of movie that is so bad you feel embarrassed for everyone involved, the kind of movie that is so bad it makes you feel a little better about the fact that the theatrical movie-going experience is dying. And it wouldn’t even really be worth discussing - the sooner this garbage is forgotten, the better - except that it happens to have been directed and co-written by Ethan Coen, who, working with his brother, Joel, has previously made some of the greatest films of all time.
Joel and Ethan unceremoniously split up four years ago, and while Drive-Away Dolls is the third film one of the Coen brothers has made since the iconic duo opted for solo careers, it’s only the first one to have an original screenplay: Joel Coen’s sole offering to date has to been The Tragedy of Macbeth, and Ethan Coen’s previous outing was a documentary consisting entirely of archival footage, Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind. Ethan co-wrote Drive-Away Dolls with his wife, Tricia Cooke, and the results strongly suggest that Joel brought something to the table that Cooke does not and that Ethan desperately needs: Ethan seems to have a lot of big, crazy ideas, but I’m guessing Joel is the one who managed to iron those ideas out into a coherent story. Ethan has already written fiction and theater without Joel, and none of it has been all that great, but Drive-Away Dolls is a car wreck - worse, it’s a car wreck with no seatbelts or airbags. O brother, where art thou? indeed.
Drive-Away Dolls is set in 1999 for no discernible reason other than to be able to make Ralph Nader jokes and include a subplot about men who allowed Cynthia Albritton (a.k.a. ‘Cynthia Plaster Caster’) to make plaster casts of their penises (if the movie were set in 2024, those men would be in their 80s; this way they get to be in their 50s). The protagonists are a pair of friends who also happen to be lesbians: Jamie is an oversexed free spirit, played by Margaret Qualley (Sanctuary), who plays oversexed free spirits almost exclusively; the undersexed and uptight Marian is played by Geraldine Viswanathan (Blockers), who has not, to the best of my knowledge, played such a similar character before. After Jamie runs afoul of her cop girlfriend (Beanie Feldstein) and Marian has to ward off the advances of a Phish fan, the duo decide to relocate to Tallahassee (fleeing the state to avoid Phish, by the way, is the most relatable part of the plot). So they go to get a rental car, except due to a whacky misunderstanding, they wind up with a vehicle intended for some gangsters. Unbeknownst to them, said vehicle’s trunk contains two MacGuffins of a sensitive nature, so now the ladies have a target on their collective back. A lot of other crazy stuff happens, including several uncredited (and unmotivated) cameos by Miley Cyrus as a thinly-veiled version of Albritton, all shot through the Instagram lava lamp filter, and then, after 84 minutes that feels like 84 hours, the movie ends.
Drive-Away Dolls is reminiscent of (much, much, MUCH) better Coen brothers movies in both its comedy-noir premise and the way the narrative is peppered with seemingly-random-but-really-not-so-random references to cultural figures and events that, in theory at least, clue the viewer into some of the story’s thematic concerns; in Raising Arizona it’s a Woody Woodpecker tattoo, in The Big Lebowski it’s the first Gulf War, in The Man Who Wasn’t There it’s a preoccupation with UFOs, and here it’s random references to Cicero, Alice B. Toklas, and the writing of Henry James, all of whom I’m quite certain would sue the shit out Ethan Coen if they were alive to see their names tarnished by its association with this crud.
But that’s about where the similarities with other Coen brothers films ends. It would be fair to say that many Coen brothers movies are, to varying degrees, live-action cartoons, but Drive-Away Dolls is a live-action cartoon with all the exaggerated reality and none of the wit (there is one pretty good gag at the very, very, VERY end of the movie). The pacing is so fast that nothing lands; the movie’s trailer gives about as much time to the set-up as the actual movie does. The characters are thin and barely-consistent: when they find the Pulp Fiction-esque magic suitcase in the car’s trunk partway through the movie, it’s Marian the rule-follower who insists on opening it while Jamie the rule-breaker protests. And there are scores of goofy scene transitions that I suspect were meant to invoke Looney Tunes but mostly make you think about a kid who has just gotten to play with iMovie for the first time. Drive-Away Dolls makes The Hudsucker Proxy and The Ladykillers look like John Cassavetes films by comparison.
The Coen name is still sufficiently prestigious to rope in a top-notch cast, often for roles so thankless they should qualify as community service. The highly in-demand Pedro Pascal, for example, receives fifth billing for less than three minutes of screen time (I’m not exaggerating when I say his entire part is in the trailer), concluding with a bizarre homage to his character from Game of Thrones. They could have literally gotten some random dude off the street to play his part and said random dude would surely have done just as good a job as Pascal. I say this not to disparage the immensely talented Pascal, but to disparage Ethan Coen: it’s fucking insulting what he does to this cast. Coleman Domingo, Matt Damon, and American goddamn treasure Bill Camp, whose entire role is also viewable in the trailer, are just as wasted.
On the other hand, Joey Slotnick from The Single Guy has more lines than he’s had in a wide-release film since the ‘90s, so there’s that, I guess.
Cooke, I feel I must mention, identifies as queer, which I, personally, do not. So take this with a grain of salt, but: I think this movie is actually pretty insulting to the LGBTQ+ community. There’s a scene where the protagonists attend a make-out slumber party with a girls’ soccer team, and we’re not supposed to find that creepy. What, I wonder, is the point of reinforcing right wing propaganda equating gays and pedophiles? It feels like edge-lordism at best and severe tone-deafness at worst (last year’s vastly superior Dicks: The Musical played with a similar idea, but did so hilariously and with clear purpose). Coen and Cooke might argue that it pushes the relationship between Jamie and Marian forward, but there are roughly 87,000,000,000 other ways they could have achieved this. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that the filmmakers included the scene with the specific intention of goading Fox News pundits into giving their movie free publicity. Alas, Fox News pundits have been too busy speculating on Taylor Swift psyops to give a shit about this picture.
I don’t know to what degree the Coen brothers’ break-up was acrimonious or not, but if they did part ways on bad terms, Joel Coen must be tickled pink by just how awful a film his brother has produced. Can someone please Parent Trap these two back together ASAP? Either that or force them into retirement. If either of them make any more movies as bad this, I fear their legacy awaits a similar fate to Steve Buscemi’s character in Fargo.