Drive-Away Dolls (2024)

Score: 2.5 / 5

Drive-Away Dolls promised a lot of fun in its irreverent homage to road trips and screwball comedies, and while some will appreciate its kitschy femininity on display, one is left wondering what the point of all the fuss is, and why Ethan Coen thought he was the filmmaker to handle it.

Set in 1999, this crime caper starts in Philadelphia as two lesbians plan a road trip to Tallahassee. The time period and destination seem a wink and a nod to those of us who know these characters are on the brink of a conservative spiral in national politics. Note that these two lesbians are, truly, friends: Jamie (Margaret Qualley) has recently been kicked out of her ex's (Beanie Feldstein) apartment for her infidelity, and uptight Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) just wants to get out of town and birdwatch in a more exotic locale. Jamie seems eager to get Marian to loosen up, and her infidelity seems a fact of life, as she increasingly flirts with Marian in the hopes of some casual sex on their road trip. Between the BBQ joints and lesbian bars along the way, of course.

Short on funds, they plan to drive a booked one-way car to Tallahassee, not knowing that their car has already been booked by someone else. Proprietor Curlie (Bill Camp) might make some shady deals, but he also makes a terrible mistake in this instance, as the car he lends the girls is already loaded with a suitcase carrying untold secrets between criminals. Thankfully, unlike in Pulp Fiction, we do get to know what's inside this one, and it is admittedly very funny, thanks in no small part to the ensemble presence of Pedro Pascal and Matt Damon and Colman Domingo in effective bit parts meant to showcase the desperation and inadequacies of men in the face of loud and proud young dykes.

There is plenty to enjoy in this film, especially if you like crude sexual humor and obvious aesthetic ploys for kitsch and irony. The brightly lit material and zany situations feel straight out of a John Waters flick, but rather than bask in its own mise en scène, the film keeps ramping up its own absurdities, adding pointless action and forced one-liners to guide the flow of each sequence. It jerks us back and forth between the two main lesbians and their pursuers, everybody bickering with each other. Thankfully the performances, especially of Qualley and Feldstein, are dedicated and inspired, proving Coen's steadfast ability to wrangle killer deliveries from his actors.

I could never quite shake the feeling, however, that this film was simply trying too hard to do something, and I still don't know what that something is. Coen and his spouse Tricia Cooke co-wrote the screenplay, and while I don't think artists shouldn't be imaginative and creative, this material feels uncomfortable under their pens. Perhaps it's their blasé attitude toward queerness and a strange entitlement to language that isn't theirs to own; perhaps it's their crude handling of material without any consideration of the realistic basis for their humor. It's equally odd that idiosyncratic, setting-specific crime comedies like this are what made the Coen name famous, yet this feels like a B-movie knockoff of their own earlier works. Its dirty irreverence and foul-mouthed fun feel indicative of the writers' "what the hell, why not" entitlement, and I'd have preferred even a little bit of earnestness in it, like there was in the similarly silly Burn After Reading or Hail, Caesar! Then I might have cared more, especially about the faux-camp to which this movie so desperately aspires.