DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS 15
It’s all Coen south…
SEE THIS IF YOU LIKED
KISS ME DEADLY 1955 The briefcase at the heart of Drive-Away Dolls harks back to this noir classic’s mystery box.
FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! 1965 Female-led road-trip riotousness from sexploitation maven Russ Meyer.
BURN AFTER READING 2008 There’s a precedent for dildos in Coen films… check out George Clooney’s sex chair in this spy farce.
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★★★★★ OUT 15 MARCH CINEMAS
DIRECTOR Ethan Coen STARRING Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, Beanie Feldstein, Colman Domingo, Pedro Pascal SCREENPLAY Ethan Coen, Tricia Cooke DISTRIBUTOR Universal RUNNING TIME 84 mins
It perhaps says something about the Coen brothers’ respective sensibilities that, when older sibling Joel went off to make 2021’s The Tragedy of Macbeth in black and white with wife Frances McDormand, younger brother Ethan chose to dust off a raunchy crime romp he had written with his wife 20 years ago, and shoot it in eye-popping colour.
A freewheeling road movie about two queer chums being pursued by hoods from Pennsylvania to Florida, Drive-Away Dolls is definitely not Shakespeare. But it is unmistakably a Coen(s) film, albeit one that feels more like a pastiche of their previous pictures than an innovative next chapter.
There are times when ‘Throw-Away Dolls’ might arguably have been a more suitable title for this knockabout caper, in which loquacious Texan Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and her prim friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) take an impromptu road trip from Philadelphia to Tallahassee, in a rental car that just happens to have a sought-after suitcase secreted in its trunk. Said valise and its contents are prized enough for a sharp-suited mandarin dubbed ‘The Chief’ (Colman Domingo) to send two bumbling goons to retrieve it. Jamie, meanwhile, has her own mission improbable: to get Marian laid.
When Tricia Cooke – Ethan’s spouse, the Coens’ sometime-editor and a person who identifies as queer – conceived the film’s scenario, it carried the more provocative moniker Drive-Away Dykes. Curiously, though, Dolls is more quaint than outrageous. Its 1999 setting and saucy details (a wall-mounted dildo here, a Sapphic slumber party there) lend it the air of a bawdy period piece from the Porky’s and Meatballs era.
Coen and Cooke’s stated aim was to homage both the trashy aesthetics of John Waters and early Almodóvar, and such noted ‘sexploitation’ purveyors as Russ Meyer and Doris Wishman. In this they are mostly successful – but it comes at the cost of their collaboration having a distinctive timbre of its own. Throw in a luggage-sized McGuffin straight out of Pulp Fiction, and we’re left with a comedy steeped in déjà vu.
There is no denying, though, that Qualley and Viswanathan make a highly likeable duo in a film that also boasts entertaining cameos from the likes of Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal and pop star Miley Cyrus.
THE VERDICT Ethan Coen strikes out on his own with a frivolous frolic that wears its slightness like a badge of honour.