Drive-Away Dolls

I wanted to like this, really have never seen a Coen movie that wasn't good... until this one. It has some funny moments, no doubt, but they were pretty few and far between.

Possibly some of this flew over my head, as I'm not a member of the lesbian community, but again just not my thing.

I thought the criminals were fairly funny and the two leads had some moments, but I really wish we got more high quality comedies in this day and age. Too few and the ones that get here are usually meh.

If you want a good Coen brothers comedy, checkout burn after reading, it's hilarious. Really wish this was better, but it's way too uneven.

This maybe had 45-50 minutes worth of content and it made 84 minutes feel long. The script needed a lot of work and I'm shocked Ethan Coen released something this half baked.

There are a few moments of enjoyment but, they are few and far between. They went for a campy feel but I never found Qualley's performance convincing and Viswanathan came off more wooden than intended. The side characters had more funny moments and funny performances than the leads.

On the plus side, the last 10-15 minutes were thoroughly entertaining. It's like they had an ending in mind and worked backwards from there. It failed miserably to build something worthy of the idea and had some unintentional cringeworthy moments.

A movie like this relies almost entirely on the charisma and chemistry of the two leads. I suppose either it works for you or it doesn't. Definitely didn't for me, but hey. Although there are moments early on that feel promising, it never quite gets to where you thought it would.

I never thought I'd say this, but the Coen brand of humor ticked up just one notch too far in the "silly" direction with this one. Unfortunately, this made the tender and emotionally targeted parts of the film feel forced and underdeveloped.

In all, it just felt like the marketing and promotion was a bit mismanaged on this movie. It wasn't an "on the run" cat and mouse movie by any means. More of a light hearted, raunchy, cutesy love story.

The only thing going for it is the quick runtime, and even that felt like a slog at times.

3 stars for trying.

It's not an original comment at all, but after enduring DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS, I really felt like I had been left dumber than I was going in. This movie is such a massive mis-fire, I'm really shocked it got any kind of release. What drew me in was my 40 year long affection for the films of the Coen Brothers. I figured with a film from Ethan Coen, I was in for a breezy good time like some of the Coen's lesser works offered (I'm thinking INTOLERABLE CRUELTY or maybe BURN AFTER READING). What I got was a ridiculous mash-up of themes, none of which were well thought out or entertaining.

This 84 minute movie follows Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), two friends who also happen to be lesbians (but are not "together"). Jamie is a wild-child from Texas, all one-night stands and hedonistic. Marian is buttoned-up and hasn't had a lover in 3 years or more. While not exactly closeted, the 1999 setting of this film means she isn't exactly openly gay either. They decide to take a trip down to Tallahassee (I don't even recall all the rationale for that), and to make it financially viable to do so, they use a drive-away service that hooks them up with a car bound for that very Florida city. Sadly, the owner of the drive-away service thought the two young ladies worked for the criminals who ARE supposed to be driving the car south, leading to a pair of "goons" (as listed in the credits) to chase after the two young ladies in a time before real cell phone coverage or other tech that might have made the pursuit easier.

Antics ensue, revolving mostly around the sexual shenanigans of the two girls (mostly kinda icky), the endless arguments between the two goons (none of which were interesting at all) and the eventual discovery of what was in the trunk of the car that the ladies aren't supposed to know about (involving the creation of plaster casts made of the private parts of certain conservative political figures).

My biggest problem with the film was the ridiculous, over-the-top portrayal of lesbian sexuality. Coupled with the silly plaster casts we are often obliged to gaze at, and you've got a film that feels like it was written by a ninth grade boy who doesn't understand how sex works and REALLY doesn't understand how lesbian sex works. Most of the sex scenes were embarrassing to watch, they were so childish.

These scenes MIGHT have been at least some fun, had they not starred the truly dreadful Margaret Qualley. I've seen her give decent performances before (NOVITIATE, ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD), but here her wild energy is uncontained and generic. Nothing she does feels rooted in any kind of reality, even the skewed reality of this film. It wants to be a daring performance; instead, it is silly and not for one moment did it feel like I watching a real person. Viswanathan, on the other hand, is marginally convincing, and the only character we root for at all.

Pedro Pascal and Matt Damon make very brief cameo appearances. They both look dreadfully embarrassed to be in the film. (I felt actively bad for Damon.) And the film even manages to make the delightful Colman Domingo uninteresting.

A deep disappointment, insulting to lesbians (rather than "liberating" as I assume it intended to be) and simply stunning to be coming from Ethan Coen. Avoid!!

Drive Away Dolls is the latest film from Ethan Coen but the first without collaboration from brother Joel. While Joel whittled away with a stark, black and white adaptation of Macbeth starring an utterly joyless Denzel Washington, Ethan's film wouldn't feel out of place alongside a 70s B-movie double feature. Dolls is replete with cheesy transitions, awkward close-ups, obnoxious neon, vintage Coen accents, and a welcome-but-not-quite-good-enough use of Maggot Brain. It's also a mixed bag of indulgent violence, puritan degeneracy, and half-baked characterizations.

The film follows Jamie and Marian as they drive to Tallahassee, inadvertently picking up precious cargo belonging to a group of shady individuals who have killed to keep it in their possession. The film is an interesting but sometimes tedious clash of black crime farce and melodramatic lesbian dramedy, devoting infrequent time to either story for proper depth or development.

Positives first. The film is funny. Not always funny, not quite funny enough, and garishly lacking the type of transgressive abrasiveness to make the material shine...but in general, it's funny. Though the characters aren't drawn intricately, their details (both from the script and the performances) are emphasized and repeated to build adequate rapport with each other and the audience.

Dolls is also stylized, in a perplexingly cheap but modestly endearing sort of way. The gimmicky transitions and trippy, spacey moments help build vital momentum to keep the first half breezy and engaging. However, Coen's parlor tricks wane and drag when the plot thickens and the film must carry itself on the merits of its own internal logistics and validity. When that time comes, the Dolls implodes.

Again, Dolls is a grinding mishmash of crime comedy and lesbian dramedy, an interesting conceit which never works with itself to create unity or continuity. The stories of disparate, often as jarring and incongruent as the smash-cut transitions which hold them together like staples through skin. The material feels like a first draft or an untalented mockery of a Coens brothers' script. The heart, patience, and icily detached bemusement of their earlier work has been augmented into the dishearteningly ubiquitous trend of smug, self-righteously assured moral congratulation.

Every creative choice tugs and struggles against the others, but the real letdown of Dolls is its faux dedication to irreverence in its superior first half. When the plot kicks in, when our leads are finally given true agency in regards to the bigger picture, everything becomes easy.

What should be an elongated sequence of comedic tension and unpredictability quickly upends itself to give our intrepid little heroes the necessary resources for a clean, bland getaway. The tension deflates; the comedy deflates; the interest deflates; the irreverence inverts, praising Jamie and Marian as ideal ideological models. It's disappointing and honestly unexpected, but maybe Ethan's been watching South Park recently - in the end, he managed to make it gay and make it lame.

Overall, Drive Away Dolls is tough to criticize or praise too fervently because it's a film of halves. The first half is tonally breezy and characterizations (both heroes and villains) are striking but not overbearing. In the second, the tone and treatment of protagonists is eye-rolling. In the first half, the stakes are high, the style is laid back, and the journey is leisurely. In the second, the stakes are obliterated, the style is forced, and the journey feels like a ham-fisted means to an end. See it as a curious counterpoint to Joel's Macbeth, but don't go in expecting Fargo. 5/9.