Comparison may be the thief of joy, but Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls may not offer much joy in the first place. Besides, it is difficult to talk about Drive-Away Dolls — Ethan’s first solo feature, the 2022 documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind notwithstanding — without comparing it to other films.
For example, take 2021’s The Tragedy of MacBeth, the first solo feature from Joel Coen, the yin to Ethan’s directorial yang. Joel’s black-and-white Shakespeare adaptation is self-serious, visually striking, and replete with career-topping work from nearly its entire cast. Despite its commitment to Shakespearean dialogue, the film miraculously maintains the kind of dark comedy and heart that have come to define the Coen Brothers’ filmography over the years. Drive-Away Dolls is less interested in heart. And for as much as it may be interested in comedy, the film is desperately light on laughs.
If Joel managed to anchor the brothers’ eighteen films together with a subversive sincerity, Ethan may have been found untying those self-serious strings pinning the whole operation down. Drive-Away Dolls could not take itself less seriously. Its performances are exaggerated — sans a soulful turn from Geraldine Viswanathan — and its visuals are kitschy, albeit colorful. MacBeth and Drive-Away Dolls are different projects with different goals, but only the latter ends up feeling like half a movie.
Of course, Ethan was still not alone in bringing the project to life. He co-wrote the script alongside his wife of 34 years, Tricia Cooke, who has also cut many of Ethan and Joel’s films over the last several decades. Ethan and Tricia have been working on the lesbian road trip comedy since the late 90s, making its arrival in 2024 feel somehow both too late yet right on time. Drive-Away Dolls (originally titled Drive-Away Dykes) joins such films as Bottoms, Bodies Bodies Bodies, and Booksmart as a kind of sapphic spin on the more heteronormative sex comedies of yesteryear. This latest member of the club bests its peers in certain regards, but you might be surprised to hear how much its construction suffers in comparison to the aforementioned projects, none of which were directed by an Oscar-winning filmmaker.
By far the most distracting — if sometimes amusing — element in Drive-Away Dolls is its editing, courtesy of Cooke. Here the creative approach seems to be even more specifically rooted in the screwball comedies and capers of the 1970s. Cooke employs several old-school editing tricks, transitioning between scenes with a bevy of irises and wipes. Such style immediately injects Drive-Away Dolls with a dose of lightheartedness that lends itself well to its B-movie aspirations, but contemporary viewers will struggle to separate the silliness from their familiarity with the transition presets offered by Microsoft PowerPoint.
At times, Cooke’s editing and Coen’s direction combine to create something legitimately exciting. The 84-minute film is peppered with psychedelic sequences starring one of the biggest pop stars today (to spoil her identity is to ruin the film’s only great surprise). These moments will feel familiar to anyone who stepped foot inside the blue movie theaters of the 1970s and 80s, or to younger film fans who have found themselves on the seedier end of cinephilia. These vibrant scenes are loving homages to pornographic films like Behind the Green Door or The Opening of Misty Beethoven, but their pleasures remain fleeting. Even as Drive-Away Dolls flirts with the kind of filmmaking bravado that we have come to expect from a film that bears the name “Coen,” it ultimately settles into a disappointing complacency. For a road trip movie, Drive-Away Dolls is entirely uninterested in showcasing a single slice of Americana. Indeed, we take a few fun trips inside the lesbian bars along I-95, but even those locations feel nondescript and indistinguishable from one another.
Fortunately, these bars at least offer an outlet for the lead actresses to shine. Viswanathan and Maragaret Qualley demonstrate wonderful chemistry as Marian and Jamie, even if we know next to nothing about them. The details of their friendship and their individual backgrounds are glossed over so that the film’s broader plot machinations can get underway (although those are largely incoherent as well.) When Marian and Jamie do sit down for a beer at a roadside dive bar littered with muscular lesbians looking to score, they finally divulge their unique attitudes and feelings. Marian is uncomfortable with hookup culture, for example, while Jamie’s fast-talking Texas swagger makes her feel right at home amongst the horny lesbians of Marietta, GA or Tallahassee, FL. There is a candor to these conversations — even as Qualley’s awful accent threatens to undermine the whole shabang — which pays off the authenticity that Cooke was able to inject into the script, drawing from her own youth. But Jamie and Marian are wrapped up in something bigger (or is it smaller?) than their own sexual proclivities, so unfortunately we have to be as well.
That “something” involves a bunch of men and a briefcase filled with dildos, but even that hilarious setup winds up lost amongst the surprisingly elaborate details of the plot. Those men include the likes of Colman Domingo, Pedro Pascal, Bill Camp, and Matt Damon. With all that star power — not to mention Beanie Feldstein and underrated character actor Joey Slotnick — Drive-Away Dolls should be a lot of fun. After all, we know Ethan can write this kind of star-studded satire in his sleep — Burn After Reading is likely its closest cousin among the Coens’ shared filmography — and yet he struggles to introduce the zany zigs and zags that make his best work so consistently delightful to watch.
The reality is that this largely negative review of Drive-Away Dolls likely would not bother the creative team behind the film. It seems that Ethan and Tricia are content to have written an inconsequential B-movie, offering viewers a fun diversion, but not much else. Indeed, its onscreen representation cannot be understated, but Drive-Away Dolls will likely be remembered (if at all) as a footnote in this otherwise exciting era of sex-positive gay comedies.
