Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
Superb opening glimmer, a glint of classic Coen nonsense: Nervous schlub (Pedro Pascal) sits in a noirish neon-lit bar and is startled by the hostile presence of the waiter (Gordon MacDonald), who asks, with an undisguised, contemptuous sneer: "Another glass of … rosé?" Everything is right about that—for almost the last time in the movie. Drive-Away Dolls quickly falls into a cascade of "funny" canted angles, whopping Southern accents fried in lard, and arch dialogue delivered with all the calm delicacy of the Coen brothers' Ladykillers remake.
Drive-Away Dolls is not a Coen brothers movie, of course, but a solo directing feature by Ethan Coen, who wrote the script with Tricia Cooke, his wife and a veteran editor of some of the Coens' early films. It would be tempting to draw conclusions about what Ethan or Joel Coen brings to the partnership based on this film (harder to do with Joel's solo Macbeth, as the subject there is, as you may have noticed, drawn from a different source), and unfair, too; maybe the zaniness of the Drive-Away Dolls material dictates its loosey-goosey tone, and Ethan is actually pretty serious overall. So we won't draw conclusions. But this movie doesn't have the uncanny touch of the best Coen films, nor the gravity that tugs at even their most ridiculous premises. It just hurtles at you, breathless, insisting on its transgressive zing.
The set-up is amusing, and nicely convoluted: Sass-talkin' Jamie (Margaret Qualley) gets kicked out by her exasperated cop-girlfriend (Beanie Feldstein) and drags shy pal Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) along on a road trip to Tallahassee, eager to stop off at whatever lesbian bars may crowd the intervening highway. Their chariot is a "drive-away" car that needs to be delivered to Florida, meant to be picked up by criminal couriers but erroneously assigned to our heroines, which means that a pair of extremely Coenesque henchmen (Joey Slotnick, verbose, and C.J. Wilson, terse) go in pursuit. The cast is full of spirited people: Colman Domingo and Bill Camp continuing their runs in the modern character actors' hall of fame, plus a welcome bit from Matt Damon, as a phony Sunshine State politician whose backstory intersects with some gloriously psychedelic sequences; these crop up occasionally like the syncopated interstitial go-go dancing montages in an old Laugh-In episode.
I wanted to like all of this, and there are some hilarious bits. I have this feeling that if I see it again, without keen expectations, it might be more fun. I mean, even The Ladykillers is fun, mostly. If anything seems notable, it's that Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke put actual sex into the mix, with nudity and robust humping, something generally absent from the Coen brothers' rather chaste filmography. That's interesting, although it's not easy to reconcile Coen cartoon figures and the rawer spectacle of nakedness. Drive-Away Dolls manages a couple of moments of lyricism, including flashbacks to Marian's childhood as a queer-curious kid peeping at the skinny-dipping lady next door (regular Coen composer Carter Burwell contributes mightily to the mood there).
The thing the Coen brothers do so well in Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski is difficult to pull off, and boy, does Drive-Away Dolls provide evidence for that. The stilted tone here might work for audiences who found The Hudsucker Proxy to be just a tad too naturalistic. I resisted it from the start. Pushiness is not a good look for comedy, and this one is constantly thrusting.
February 23, 2024
