What if Bound sucked? That seemed to be the central goal in Ethan Coen’s directorial feature debut Drive-Away Dolls. With Joel moving in an artier direction with his first solo feature (2021’s The Tragedy of MacBeth), Ethan doubles down on the whackier elements of the Coen Brothers oeuvre that may have been kept in check by his brother. Drive-Away Dolls, originally titled Drive-Away Dykes takes all the worst Coen tendencies and frappes them into a pointless mélange of dead-ends and dick jokes. Imagine the gags in The Big Lebowski but without a rug that really tied them together or the gritty noir of Blood Simple stripped away of any malice and you get the mediocre B-movie Coen and his wife Tricia Cooke (who co-wrote and edited it) have created.
Worst of all, it’s a movie about young lesbians that feels like it was written by a white dude in his mid-60s. This is not inherently a bad thing, but in Coen’s world, all these lesbians want to do is fuck. Not only like a dildo stuck to a wall type of fucking, but basement parties where high school girls in soccer uniforms take turns making out with one another. Yes, the sex was pretty hot in Bound, but that movie had suspense, style and substance. Drive-Away Dolls feels like it was written after a research session on scenarios from Pornhub.
Ostensibly, Drive-Away Dolls is a road trip film about two friends driving a rental car, unaware of precious cargo hidden in the back. Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) is uptight and stuck in a boring desk job. Meanwhile, her best friend Jamie (Margaret Qualley) is a fast-talking, fast-living Southerner who has just cheated on and broken up with her cop girlfriend (Beanie Feldstein). Marian and Jamie rent a car and drive to Florida but soon become targets of a mysterious syndicate who want a briefcase hidden in the trunk.
Remember the dick chair from Burn After Reading? Imagine if the entire film hinged on the MacGuffin of that dick chair and you will get just how shallow and dumb Drive-Away Dolls is. Sure, there are some funny moments. But there are lots of shoddy sequences, too, that don’t work or that feel like padding in a movie that is already only 84 minutes, such as some psychedelic interstitial moments that feel like the animated concessions ads from an AMC theater in the ‘90s.
Drive-Away Dolls might be the most sexually explicit film that Ethan Coen has worked on and almost all that sex involves women. Though having Cooke, who identifies as queer, on board covers Coen’s ass a bit, the central relationship between Jamie and Marian never really works. According to Jamie, Marian just needs to get laid. Jamie, meanwhile, has no problem fucking anyone or anything, including more than one dildo during the film’s lean runtime.
Nothing really coalesces into anything interesting here. Even when the Coen Brothers were at their most shaggy, a certain anything-goes-joie-de-vivre elevated even their crappiest projects. Drive-Away Dolls is less charming than Intolerable Cruelty and less funny than The Ladykillers. Those are the Coen Brothers’ worst two films by a longshot. Drive-Away Dolls sucks even more.
Photo courtesy of Focus Features
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