‘Drive-Away Dolls’ a diverting, ‘Diet-Coen’ road movie
This image released by Focus Features shows Geraldine Viswanathan, right, and Margaret Qualley in a scene from "Drive-Away Girls."
Focus Features via AP
The Coen Brothers make movies unlike most everything on the market.
Even then, their filmography can be splintered into distinct flavor types, from something as gripping and serious as “No Country for Old Men” to the absurdist worlds of “Raising Arizona” and “The Big Lebowski.”
After the release of their Western anthology film, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” Joel and Ethan famously went their separate ways to direct different projects. Joel took on Shakespeare with the haunting and gorgeous “The Tragedy of MacBeth” in 2021. Ethan, after directing a Jerry Lee Lewis documentary in 2022, now brings the raunchy road comedy, “Drive-Away Dolls,” to the big screen.
Ethan wrote the screenplay for “Dolls” with wife Tricia Cooke (both produced, and Cooke serves as the film’s editor). With its psychedelic interludes and comedically moronic side characters, “Dolls” most fits in the catalog alongside “Big Lebowski,” but on the more uneven end of the list with “Burn After Reading” and “The Ladykillers.”
Set in 1999 (based in part because the story is an old idea by Coen and Cooke), “Dolls” follows friends Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) on a road trip to Florida. Opting to use an economic driveaway service rather than rent a car, the ladies inadvertently take the wrong car. Hidden in the trunk is a mysterious briefcase and a top-hat-sized package. Some gangsters, led by “Rustin” Oscar nominee Colman Domingo, attempt to recover the items from the unwitting travelers.
Jamie, a sex-obsessed flirt with a significant Texas accent, wants to help Marian loosen up and sow some oats while on vacation, but the pair struggle to discuss their own obvious sexual chemistry. Beside the gangsters on their tail, Jamie is also fresh off ruining a relationship with Sukie (“Booksmart” breakout Beanie Feldstein), a cop who eventually stumbles into the briefcase conflict.
With the movie set in 1999, “Dolls” certainly plays like a throwback to sex comedies from around that time, with Jamie engaged in sexual acts and conversation that would even make Steve Stifler from “American Pie” blush. The shaggy plotting and seemingly disconnected hallucinogenic interludes make the movie feel unfocused, even in its tight, under 90-minute runtime.
The two central performances provide enough amusing content nonetheless, with Qualley delivering the kind of oddball energy seen in the Coen Universe before by folks like Nicolas Cage and George Clooney. The sporadic nature of the plotting never allows the characters to be much more than slightly sharpened archetypes (don’t expect something as fully realized as, say, Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson).
“Dolls” almost exclusively peddles in foul-mouthed, sex-themed humor too, which won’t be for everyone. The crime caper itself is almost intentionally an afterthought here, though the movie relishes its occasional flashes of violence, which, for the most part, capture the Coen spirit one expects to find here.
Plus, hey, without giving it away, the movie makes as good of use of Matt Damon as that recent Dunkin Donuts commercial. “Drive-Away Dolls” may be a slight, middle-to-low-tier installment in the Coen oeuvre, but almost any dose of Coen is welcome in the current landscape of recycled Hollywood ideas.
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Tyler Wilson can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.