1 Coen Brother + 2 Randy Lesbians = 1 Plaster-Cast Crime Caper
DIRECTED BY ETHAN COEN/2024
Per an old joke from Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Florida is “America’s flaccid penis.” That joke might just date back to the late ‘90s- when Drive-Away Dolls takes place. Florida, where it may be illegal to speak the truth about history and gender there, but the truth will come out. Florida, where its governor’s liar’s nose gets in the way of his drummed-up spat with the corporation responsible for making Pinocchio a household name. It’s Florida, man.
If any of that appalls or offends you, stay the heck away from Drive-Away Dolls, the latest rollicking headscratcher and first solo directorial feature from Ethan Coen. As half of the Oscar winning sibling duo whose critical and popular winning streak spanned for decades, between genres, tonalities, and general accessibility, Ethan follows in the footsteps of brother Joel in making his own doggone movie all by himself! In it, all roads lead to- you guessed it, Florida man… Florida!!
As degenerate as it is intellectual as it is hilarious as it is confounding, Drive-Away Dolls takes us back to the turn of the current, increasingly dumb century, when Y2K panic was rampant and Bill Clinton wasn’t quite done being President. It also takes us to the aforementioned flaccid penis state of Florida, the perfect destination for a warped crime comedy such as this.
That story goes a little something like this: two girls (Margaret Qualley as the verbose and newly dumped Janie, and Geraldine Viswanathan as the demure Marian) – each a lesbian but not sharing a romantic relationship but maybe kinda wanna- decide to go down south. Meaning, they hit the road for…Florida! Except, it seems the car they rented for their trip is bearing residual gruesome cargo of the highly sought-after variety. Once they realize that ransoming this junk could mean big bucks, they must elude a couple of killers (Joey Slotnick and C.J. Wilson, led by the far smarter Colman Domingo) and cash in on the briefcase they’ve stumbled onto which is full of verboten items. A “family values” conservative senator (Matt Damon) will do whatever he must to get that briefcase, and deeply incriminating cargo (hint: it ain’t flaccid!), back in his heretofore clean hands.
Damon, no stranger to playing a supposedly righteous right-winger with a past (see: his SNL portrayal of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh), isn’t in Drive-Away Dolls all that much, but he makes a big impression. Just take it from the decades-ago source of his character’s problems, the psychedelic muse known as Tiffany Plaster Caster (played in a series of kitschy ‘60s flashback cameos by Miley Cyrus and based on the real-life late countercultural personality, Cynthia Plaster Caster). Eventually, he’s gonna have to bite the bullet and meet Janie and Marian wherever they say… which just so happens to be a lesbian bar called The She Shed. (The She Shed looks an awwwwwful lot like another bar from the beginning of the movie, that one occupied by Pedro Pascal and some nut with a hacksaw).
Drive-Away Dolls, a project long in gestation by Coen and his wife Tricia Cooke (and rumored to be the first of a lesbian road movie trilogy??), doesn’t just wallow in its own trashy, direct-to-VHS milieu, it basks in it. But this raucous lark has more brains in the trunk than its cheapo veneer lets on- and not just because of the iced severed head in the hat box that’s traveling with the all-important briefcase. With liberal references to Henry James literature (more than that, it’s in the movie’s DNA), Alice B. Toklas, and, faintly, other highly regarded Coen Brothers’ films, Drive-Away Dolls packs more traditional intellectual pleasure than your standard Russ Meyer programmer (also an influence!).
Margaret Qualley goes for broke in her vocal channeling of Holly Hunter in Raising Arizona. Unfortunately, it breaks us- and rather quickly. Sooner than later, one may realize that Qualley’s supposedly Texas twang is going to be an utter constant for the duration, so one best reconcile with that. The alternative would be to get up and leave. And one should stay. The dialect, though, is so intense, so obviously deliberate, it feels like something out of an ill-advised Coen brothers knock-off. Which…… say…..!
Maybe ripping off the Coen “brand” is the whole bit with Drive-Away Dolls? (It is something of a heist movie, after all). My own theory of Ethan and Joel’s penultimate work together to date, 2016’s perplexing Hollywood fable Hail, Caesar!, is that they set out to make a showcase actualizing ignorant people’s assumptions about old movies that said people haven’t ever watched. It’s a Hollywood re-imagining of sorts, built to falsely reinforce ignorance while also contorting the genres depicted- the splashy musical, the studio-bound Western, the Sirk-ian melodrama, the Biblical epic- to make them their own. Quite literally, no one is the wiser for this, but they render this kind of onion-skinning nonsense wholly for their own amusement, just because they can. If that take holds any water whatsoever, it’s no stretch to think that one or both of the brothers would apply that practice to their own distinct flair. Hence, a Coen Brothers knockoff by a Coen brother.
Ironically, as whackadoodle as Drive-Away Dolls is, the center-most question in the whole of the always ding-dang puzzling work of the Coen Brothers might just be a bit more answerable now. Maybe. That is, the question of which Coen brother leans towards what type of sensibility. As of this writing, Joel Coen and Ethan Coen each now have a solo solo movie to their name. A few years ago, Joel gave us (well, he gave AppleTV+ subscribers) the lofty Shakespeare reimagining, The Tragedy of Macbeth. Ethan, meanwhile, has bestowed Drive-Away Dolls onto an ever-unsuspecting public. As rickety, precarious, and straight-up unadvisable as it might be, it’s just too darn tempting to extrapolate clues from this. Although one could never believe that the streams of high-falutin’ drama and low-brow larks don’t cross (of course they do!), it’s not a ridiculous leap to get to thinking… “Fargo = Joel… The Big Lebowski = Ethan. Raising Arizona = Ethan. Miller’s Crossing = Joel. No Country for Old Men = Joel. Hail, Caesar! = ?? Okay, maybe this isn’t as cut and dry as all that. Perhaps what we can extrapolate at this juncture is that, as satisfying as The Tragedy of Macbeth and Drive-Away Dolls might be, the Coen Brothers remain better together than separate.
Still, Drive-Away Dolls resonates, even reverberates well after the fact. Yes, its cheesy psychedelic interstitials eventually make some sense, but still not that much. But later, when you’re at work or minding your own business, this movie will permeate your thoughts. It’ll stick in your craw. It’ll drive your car. It’ll send you up a tree. So pack well but light, and gun it for the She Shed in the limp, great state of Florida for a penetratingly crass good time at the movies.