At this point, it seems the only thing to do with the unproduced screenplays penned by the Coen Brothers – save for their re-writes of projects like To the White Sea, which is a masterpiece out-and-out – is to find the most secure and heaviest safe possible to place the documents in, and then for some Maersk ship to take them, under cover of night, to the deepest point in the ocean for safe dumping. The “script by the Coen Brothers” credit isn’t as prestigious as it might seem: Sure, they re-wrote Bridge of Spies and Unbroken, but their other efforts were Sam Raimi’s Crimewave, which critics have spent decades trying to positively reevaluate and failing to do so; The Naked Man, a Michael Rappaport wrestling comedy that nobody saw; the remake of Gambit, which couldn’t even get a theatrical release in the states, and George Clooney’s Suburbicon, which was dead on arrival. But get ready for a wave of pieces asking if Clooney was actually on to something – that film, for all of its flaws, was shot competently, edited well, and was semi-coherent, at least allowing for it to be properly read by the audience so that they could full comprehend all of the ready-made stuff to roll their eyes at.
When the pair split up after The Ballad for Buster Scruggs and announced that they’d still continue to make movies, they were put in a kind of undeserved competition – post-split Lennon vs. McCarthy, or Chilton vs. Bell, or Morrissey vs. Marr – and Joel’s opening salvo, The Tragedy of Macbeth, was a good one. Ethan’s first foray into solo narrative features (I haven’t seen his Jerry Lee Lewis doc, but it might be pretty good!) is Drive-Away Dolls, a long-gestating lesbian screwball comedy crime caper, originally titled Drive-Away Dykes before someone stepped in and realized that using that language might drive away its audience, isn’t.
A fun aspect of drawer-bound screenplays is that they wind up unintentionally dating themselves: Dolls was penned in an era in which the idea of drive-aways – a one-way cash-secured trip with a car that isn’t technically a rental car but isn’t yours to smoke or puke in – was a much more common one. It’s ’99, probably only a few years removed from when this was originally written, and as the world gets ready for a new millennium, a man (Pedro Pascal) in a crummy Philly dive bar sweats between glasses of rose, clutching a metal briefcase. Pascal’s our Janet Leigh here, which is a cushy gig: his murder is the film’s inciting incident, as a group of shadowy dudes catch him in an alley after he leaves the bar, crush his skull, and take the briefcase. That’s the one that winds up in the trunk of the Tallahassee-bound Drive-Away, driven by the Dolls of the title, an odd couple of lesbians who uneasily fit the screwball pair dynamic.
Our Cary Grant is Marian (the normally very funny Geraldine Viswanathan), a bookish and prim-and-proper young woman who wears Jackie Brown suits to gay bars. She is practically chaste despite wanting to fit in better with her very sex-positive community. Our Katharine Hepburn is Jamie (Margaret Qualley, making an initially funny but increasingly unintelligible impression of her mom), a Texan sexual dynamo with Sandy Cheeks’ voice, half of the brains, and a thing for wall-mounted dildos. Both of them have reached the natural end of their arcs in Philly – Marian’s cognizant that she’s boring and doesn’t fit in, and Jamie has fucked one too many people behind the back of her cop girlfriend (Beanie Feldstein) – so they’re making their way to North Florida to start fresh.
Jamie’s the one who gets the idea to do the drive-away, but she has a keen distaste for the rules of the pseudo-rental: You’re supposed to get the car to its destination by a certain time, and in the girls’ case, that’s barely a day away. So, they frolic, somewhat, stopping in dusty towns and staying in shitty motels, with Marian plugging away at Henry James’ The Europeans in the motel office while Jamie breaks some bed-springs with whatever tail she’s pulled that night. Meanwhile, back in Philly, the man in charge of the murder plot (Colman Domingo) has sent two goons (Joey Slotnick and CJ Wilson) on the road to try and get the briefcase – and another key item in the trunk – back from them after they miss the first drop-off date. Their misadventures are the few bits of the movie that work, such as their “interview” with a lesbian soccer team following their interactions with Jamie and Marian, but we don’t spend too much time with them. After all, there’s not too much space in an 84-minute movie beyond the essentials, and if you told me that the script, which Coen wrote alongside his wife and collaborator Tricia Cooke, struggled to hit the 60-page mark, I’d believe you. We have random flights of ‘60s esoterica fantasy emerging out of almost nowhere to suck valuable minutes away from the story, all of which are centered around a third-act reveal (and subsequent cameo) that incorporates VH1 rock lore in the most boomer-brained sort of way all of which works to inhibit any of the character growth and limits the opportunity for them to do screwball shit. It stays flat, and you can feel a behind-the-scenes flailing to try and generate some life in the final product.
What Coen and Cooke (who is also the film’s editor) settle on to try to jolt some voltage into the stopped heart of this feature is… the After Effects premium transition package. You rarely notice dissolves or transitions in a lot of movies – perhaps a sign of someone doing their job well, saving a flourish for when it means something – but here, you’ll see some of the most ridiculous shit outside of a film school editing suite fuck-around. A scene ends and transitions to black, and then the opening shot of the next one falls on top of it like a clapper, or that final frame spins around like a license plate that’s been hit by a stone from a slingshot. This is a choice to suggest a certain level of “zaniness,” where there’s not enough actual anarchic energy presented on screen to sustain momentum from one moment to the next. It’ll certainly be enough to misdirect the people who constantly (and justifiably) complain about the lack of style in modern studio comedy into thinking that the rest of the movie doesn’t look like shit, but it wasn’t for me. It’s astonishing how weirdly ugly this movie is: The framing and textures are off-balance in a near amateur-hour fashion, and Coen can’t settle on a specific style to sustain him from frame to frame, which has a strange effect when they’re placed in juxtaposition: A phone call between a character in Tallahassee and one in Philly is lit in such a starkly different way that it looks like they’ve somehow called collect between totally different films.
That desperation cares over into the humor, which starts mild enough – an early scene features Coen-esque dialogue between Marian and a soft-spoken idiot at her former place of work who can’t seem to take a hint when he keeps trying and failing to ask her out – yet eventually grinds into surprising territory when Coen realizes he’s making one of those knock-off Tarantino flicks that would have been almost-assuredly pay-cable bypass bound back in the ‘90s. There’s no tension, stake-raising, or real bond between the characters that emerge throughout the film, and soon, all you’re left with is Qualley’s accent and Viswanathan’s eye-rolls at her behavior, which become tiring enough. This is, after all, the kind of movie in which characters flatly declare their realizations for the audience rather than letting us experience their changes alongside them. Had a movie like Drive-Away Dolls dropped in the SXSW Narrative Competition without fanfare or its expensive cast and directed by younger millennials instead of a pushing-70 male filmmaker with a legit legacy behind him, I could understand the three-star-and-shrug that this movie is going to receive from critics and audiences. But coming from Ethan Coen… well, we should all have blasted “Yub Nub” and bashed on Stormtrooper helmets when Ethan announced a few weeks ago that he’d be getting back together with Joel for another project.
But Drive-Away Dolls is felled by the same thing that slays a lot of “raunchy” higher-brow comedy: its self-satisfaction at its boundary-breaking is unearned, and “taboo” humor is well past the sell-by date for mainstream audiences, even less so for queer ones, much in the same way that Dicks: The Musical was when it hit theaters last year. Perhaps if this movie had come out in 2007, it might have had an ounce of the effect that Coen wishes it would. Yet it has been birthed into a cinematic culture that has largely forgotten how to make or enjoy intentionally sexy films, much less bawdy comedies about them. In the Pornhub era, sex doesn’t sell in the same way that it used to at the multiplex – filmmakers now have to keep up with every juke and jive that the algorithm throws at them – and it’s had a real consequence for hacky comedies that rely on pure shock value.
A filmmaker can’t just show a dick on screen anymore and expect people to laugh when Drake’s nudes are in the group chat or point out to people that, Yes, Virginia, Hypocritical Republicans Watch Porn And Fuck Too, when Ted Cruz likes Cory Chase’s tweets on main. Unfortunately, they have to be clever and competent, or they have to be quick, and Drive-Away Dolls is neither.