Directed: Ethan Coen
Written: Tricia Cooke and Ethan Cohen
What is this? Is it a road movie? A farce? A fever dream where Miley Cyrus makes a cameo appearance ?(I’ve had those). Is it noir? Is it a comic book? Did Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke wake up one day and just go “the world needs more lesbian road trip movies” and then dropped acid while writing the screenplay?
I don’t know, but whatever It was, I’m here for it.
It’s bawdy, and brilliant and I loved it and I don’t care who knows it. It’s got the tone that Itty Bitty Titty Committee should have had if way back then the writers and producers had had the guts to do it. Drive-away Dolls is quite simply a madcap, genre-bending romp that destroys the road movie trope by gleefully peeling out of its own lane and swerving into chaos.
But let’s address the elephant in the room – there’s some bad reviews out there. From what I can tell, Drive-away Dolls copped flack mostly for being joyfully queer. All those bros who would have followed the Coen Brothers to the death if they’d just stayed in their nice, friendly, straight space finally found that there is indeed a bridge too far. Well, screw them is all. I’m incredibly sad I did not see this film at a festival with a room full of drunk lesbians. Man, that would have been a kick.
The film opens with a premise that, in less talented hands, might seem almost too pedestrian. Due to various bad decisions, two best friends, Jamie and Marian, decide to take a spontaneous cross-country road trip, only to find themselves possessing a briefcase that a cavalcade of eccentric criminals want for hilarious reasons.
What distinguishes "Drive-away Dolls" is not just its willingness to embrace the absurd, but the caliber of its cast and THEIR commitment to the absurdity. Jamie and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan and Margaret Qualley) have a comic timing so precise it borders on telepathic. Also, I’ve never seen Beanie Feldstein funnier than she is here as Jamie’s psycho cop ex-girlfriend who only has a few scenes but they’re all pivotal and completely over the top.
As exciting a talent as Qualley is – just as delightfully watchable as her amazing mother Andie McDowell – the deadpan role is the harder to play, and Viswanathan serves as both the “straight” woman and a secret agent of chaos. With a single arched brow or sardonic line reading, she can tilt an entire scene sideways, and she brings an emotional core to the film that counterbalances Qualley’s pure eccentricity.
Also - the name of Pedro Pascal’s little more than a cameo character is “penis collector”. Just…amazing. A delicious ten minutes of the film centers on them encountering a women’s soccer team with a butch captain. This film never met a lesbian cliche it didn’t love, but there’s so much love for queerness here, it actually works.
The film’s pacing is brisk but never rushed, giving every gag room to breathe and every set piece a chance to escalate to its full, chaotic potential. For a lesbian film that’s also the world’s longest dick joke, they did actually manage to keep the gutter humor to a minimum, introducing slapstick where needed and subverting the expected, such as having a couple of bickering, straight evil henchmen (“goon 1” and “goon 2” in the credits - outstanding) who are as queer and married as any married couple could possibly be.
Jamie and Marian’s journey, for all its weird, sexy detours, is ultimately one of self-discovery and love. Jamie wants to rescue Marian from her self-imposed emotional and physical celibacy, and Marian just wants Jamie to show her some respect, and to maybe eat less pussy. That they eventually meet in the middle to the satisfaction of all with a delicious, unapologetically gay happy ending. No lesbians dying here, either existentially or in bed. Huzzah!
Like any good MacGuffin, what’s in the briefcase that everyone is chasing turns out to be largely irrelevant, though we do find out what it is. Road movies are never about the destination anyway. The whole point of this genre is the journey, and that’s one aspect of the road movie trope this writer and director embraced with gusto.