‘DRIVE AWAY DOLLS’ A Perplexing Lesbian Road Trip Caper From One Half of the Coen Bros

A pair of odd couple lesbians head to Tallahassee in Ethan Coen’s (of the Coen brothers) bizarre comedy caper, Drive Away Dolls. Each looking for a fresh start, Jaime (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) form an unlikely pair. One is a fast-talkin’, easy-lovin’ free spirit. The other is an over-thinking, uptight introvert. But their friendship persists through their differences and after a breakup and professional stall-out the duo journey south in a “drive away” car, a service that allows renters to transports vehicles across state lines. One case of mistaken identity and a drive away car mix-up later, the pair realize they are transporting a valuable case of personal effects hidden in the car’s boot. A couple of inept goons are hot on their tail as their road trip takes them to various gay bars, touristy pit stops, and run-ins with the law in what can only be described as a bizarre herky-jerky pre-Y2K slapstick attempt. It’s at once perplexing, engaging, annoying, and utterly sloppy, and really serves to highlight just how much the Coen Brothers need one another as collaborators.

With an impressive supporting cast that includes Colman Domingo, Pedro Pascal, Matt Damon, Beanie Feldstein, Bill Camp and more, one can’t help but suspect that the one half of formerly-acclaimed Coen Brothers called in some favors, because there’s very little in the script to suggest that this slapdash comedy caper has much life in it, on the page or off. The supporting performances lean heavily towards over-the-top camp, lacking the grounded humanity that the film sorely needs. It doesn’t help that at a measly 84-minutes, Drive Away Dolls still feels long by virtue of how shallow and uneventful it is.

Despite the abbreviated runtime, the film still features multiple minutes-long psychedelic interludes. One of which features Miley Cyrus as a kind of 60’s sex siren. Add in various whiplash transitions, which underscore the film’s most goofy and grating tendencies, and the overarching feeling that only one take was shot of each scene, and you have a product that feels extremely underbaked and thoughtless.

There are a couple individual scenes and moments that stand out, particularly those shared between Jaime and Marian as their relationship flirts with exiting the friend zone, but Coen’s script rarely slows down to the point of actually engaging on a sincere emotional level. And when it does, he quickly changes gears to make his get away as fast as possible.

More than anything, Drive Away Dolls helps contextualize where certain impulses of the Coen Brothers as a collective came from. This film is much more The Ladykillers, Hail, Caesar! or Burn After Reading than it is O Brother, Where Art Thou? or Raising Arizona and yet the younger Coen bro’s influence and fingerprints can be found on all of them. There’s a certain heightened slapstick in Ethan Coen’s voice that, when paired with well-crafted characters and a certain emotional gravity, is wildly distinct, a throwback to a bygone era of filmmaking. It can be transportive, electrifying, even otherworldly. Left unchecked though, his clowning antics leave much to be desired, verging on full-blown goofball.

On a scale of caper seriousness, with 1 being clown-car levels of silly and 10 as grave as a spy thriller, this one’s zaniness is neck-and-neck with the Hamburglar plotting his next fast-food heist. Untethered from strong character development and more grounded, emotionally-relevant core, it just all feels very silly and trivial. This is especially noticeable as we move into the unprovoked violence of Drive Away Doll’s third act, whose attempt at shock only reveals a gnawing cynicism. When it’s finally revealed what’s in the case, the audience is almost scorned for caring in the first place.

Margaret Qualley, almost single-handedly, makes Drive Away Doll watchable, her infectious energy, Texas twang, and queer vibrato coalesce into a character who is often hard to look away from, despite the many narrative, thematic, and emotional shortcomings of the script she’s working from. She truly is a multidimensional star capable of powering this otherwise clunky mess of a caper comedy.

So much of Drive Away Dolls feels overly try-hard, unnecessarily screwball for the sake of being unnecessarily screwball, that you’re reticent to engage with even its most well-drawn character, trapped in this perplexing road trip comedy that too often isn’t funny or insightful or the least bit transgressive. With its brief runtime, thin characters, weak plotting, and feeble attempts at comedy, Drive Away Dolls is akin to one half of a band releasing a ‘greatest hits’ album, where they’ve re-recorded over their partner’s vocals with their own, attempting to harmonize solo—an endeavor that starkly misses the balanced interplay of their counterpart’s voice.

CONCLUSION: Ethan Coen’s first foray into solo directing with ‘Drive Away Dolls’ reveals a filmmaker liberally applying heavy-handed slapstick and little else in terms of characterization, plotting, or even comedic sensibilities. Margaret Qualley’s motormouthed performance is worth celebrating but it isn’t enough to salvage the film’s broader shortcomings.