VERDICT: This lumbering lesbian road-trip “comedy” lurches its way toward nowhere in particular.
If not properly conducted, the world’s greatest orchestra will sound terrible; with woodwinds performing in a different key than the strings, and percussion running roughshod over everything, all that results is chaos, despite the talent involved.
That’s the overall sense of watching Drive-Away Dolls, a film in which a brilliant director and co-writer works with a top-flight cast of actors but never find a sense of rhythm balance, or tone. One can sense how the scenes are meant to hit the marks of neo-screwball crime comedy and then watch in dismay as almost none of them fulfill their ambition.
Working for the first time without his brother Joel, director Ethan Coen (who wrote the script with his spouse, longtime editor Tricia Cooke) would seem to be well within his wheelhouse: Drive-Away Dolls is, at its core, a comedy about eccentric people contending with inept but still deadly criminals. But neither the eccentrics nor the criminals feel remotely like real people, and their hijinks never summon up much hilarity or suspense. (A case can be made that the recent fifth season of the TV series Fargo is a better reflection of the Coen aesthetic than this actual Coen product.)
It’s 1999, and best friends Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) are fed up with their lives in Philadelphia: the sexually voracious Jamie has just broken up with her cop girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein) after cheating on her yet again, while the buttoned-up Marian is fed up with her sexual drought and with having to fend off advances from a straight co-worker. The two decide to make their way to Tallahassee, Florida, so they rent a “drive-away,” a car to be delivered to its owner in another city.
Unfortunately, rental agent Curlie (a drily amusing Bill Camp) has lent these women a Dodge Aries that was meant to be picked up by a pair of mobsters (Joey Slotnick and CJ Wilson) who are planning to hand off a briefcase that’s hidden in the trunk. And so, as Jamie and Marian make their way through small-town queer dive bars and make-out parties with women’s soccer teams, the Goons (as they’re credited) ineptly follow, much to the dismay of criminal higher-up The Chief (Colman Domingo).
Given the participation of Cooke — an acclaimed editor who identifies as queer — it’s ironic that two of the biggest problems with Drive-Away Dolls involve its pacing and its portrayal of lesbians. The film frequently aims for the deadpan absurdism of a Coen classic like Raising Arizona or Fargo, but the back-and-forth rhythms of the dialogue never rev up to speed. Scenes lurch along, and potentially hilarious lines of dialogue linger in the air without landing.
As for the film’s notions about sexuality, it’s either presenting 20-something lesbians engaging in a highly formal makeout party in a basement — a musical chairs-like event at which everyone changes partners between Linda Ronstadt songs — or treating the existence of dildos as the funniest thing ever, parading a series of sex toys as an intended “naughty” punchline even as it pretends that it’s all a tribute to the work of the late artist Cynthia Plaster Caster. (She’s name-checked in the film and the closing credits.) The 1999 setting yields very little besides an explanation for why the lead characters don’t have cell phones (and a reason for why Sukie can sneak a gun onto an airplane).
The cast, to their credit, goes all-in, from Qualley’s absurd Texas accent to Viswanathan’s patented deadpan. Slotnick and Wilson try their hardest to recapture the Steve Buscemi-Peter Stormare rapport from Fargo (the movie), but despite their best efforts, the material fails them. Camp comes closest to creating a memorable comic performance, but it, too, gets lost in the white noise of the storytelling.
Drive-Away Dolls never satisfies, its action punctuated by eager-to-please-yet-meaningless psychedelic sequences featuring unexpected pops of Miley Cyrus (Why? Why not?); at some point, it becomes clear that it’s never going to deliver on its promise, and it’s never going to get any better, its brief 84-minute running time a fully distressing physical manifestation of “Are we there yet?”
