Drive-Away Dolls
Ethan Coen's solo outing is a road trip turned ridiculous.
Late in Drive-Away Dolls, the film cuts to slow-motion footage of a racing greyhound sprinting across a track toward the camera. We can see the dog’s racing muzzle bouncing around its nose, its wide eyes focused on the lure, its legs splaying out, kicking up dirt from the track. It looks ridiculous. Nearby, offscreen, something a little more important to the plot but no less ridiculous is happening to our main characters. We’ll return to the actual action soon enough, but in the meantime, Ethan Coen is happy to revel in the farcical red-herring image that sums up the rest of his film so neatly. Everyone in Drive-Away Dolls is running toward or away from something else, they’re all loosely connected to each other, and they all look stupid to varying degrees while they’re doing it.
The stupidity is inherent to the movie, an intentionally joyful choice on the part of co-writers Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke that recalls the comedies Ethan has made with his brother Joel. Best friends Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) and Jamie (Margaret Qualley) need to get out of Philadelphia: Marian, because she doesn’t like the uptight version of herself she’s become at work; Jamie, because she’s fresh off a break-up from her long-term girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein, savoring every scenery-chewing moment). Jamie railroads Marian into taking a drive-away car on their trip down to Tallahassee, and it just so happens that the car holds cargo intended for a different pair of drivers, two goons (Joey Slotnick and C. J. Wilson) who must retrieve the contents of a suitcase hidden in the car, lest evidence of a bigger conspiracy get out into the open. What follows is a loping comedy road trip down the Eastern seaboard, akin to the first half of Something Wild if it were populated by the characters in Fargo and The Big Lebowski.
For a road trip movie, Drive-Away Dolls feels surprisingly insular. Part of this is because of the film’s 1999 setting, with characters dependent on paper maps and their wits to navigate. The movie depends on the inconvenience of miscommunication and the lack of cell phones to set up different scenarios for comedic effect. Some of the side characters make big impressions—Pedro Pascal, in particular, plays a memorable fool briefly caught in the grip of some bad people—but the film can’t tear its focus away from its leads enough to feel like a true journey across the country. Much of the runtime is spent inside the car, camera turned inwards towards the characters driving, with only a hint of nondescript scenery flashing by the windows in the background. The action is saved for the central characters only. All other plot machinations get left by the wayside like so much lost luggage.
As the uninhibited half of the titular pair, Jamie motormouths her way into getting what she wants, whether that’s choosing the method of transportation or bringing a hookup back to the motel (and displacing Marian from the room in the process). Qualley is charismatic, breaking out a broad Texas accent and a boisterous attitude, but her enthusiastic half of the movie’s odd-couple dynamic threatens to overpower Viswanathan’s quietly rigid—and more subtle—character work. The dynamic between the two speaks to the script’s belief that the audience will assume, simply, that opposites attract and that these two characters have a long history. Both actresses are game, and we don’t need that background in order for the movie to work, but their friendship feels convenient to the plot, a somewhat thin contrivance.
Most of the character work is done through the act of sex, which is crucial to the plot. Drive-Away Dolls is, above all else, a raunchy comedy, and it tackles its story with all the enthusiasm of a swift hookup. Because the film favors Jamie’s point of view, the sex is enthusiastic and frequent, but the movie also takes the time to express Marian’s needs and desires in a way that feels true to her character. When she finally gets the chance to cut loose, it isn’t with the same rampant enthusiasm of one of Jamie’s encounters. Instead, the intimacy is expressed in a direct-to-camera closeup of Marian’s face and a cutaway shot of champagne bubbles catching light like sparks in the dusk of the room, quiet and sweet. The movie treats sex as an act of self-expression, whether passionate or gentle: a moment where two people can fully know and understand each other in every intimate sense of the word. It’s an act of honesty, and it’s refreshing to watch a sex comedy in which the threat of sexual assault never once makes itself known.
The funniest parts come from observed character behavior (especially regarding sexual situations). Still, the humor feels just calculated and exaggerated enough that it never fully registers as real; the script commits its characters to a heightened sense of farce that I enjoyed watching but never fully bought into. The problem with spending a movie in a car with a motormouth like Jamie and an uptight, quiet character like Marian is that Jamie dominates the conversation and, to a certain extent, the whole film. Jamie drives both car and plot, with Marian along for the ride. The movie is more likely to laugh with Jamie and at Marian.
Like Marian, I had fun with the film despite myself. Both Marian and Jamie are likable characters, even though the heightened tone makes them slightly unbelievable. The plot itself—the car mix-up, the suitcase and its contents, and the conspiracy behind it all—is slight, but it sneaks up on protagonists and audience alike. As with other Coen farces, there are no lessons to be learned, but there is room for a rueful sigh over past mistakes—in this case, over the naiveté of the late ’90s and the looming specter of the 2000 presidential election. Hindsight may be 20/20, but that doesn’t make the spectacle any less ridiculous.—Sarah Welch-Larson
★★★☆