Longtime fans of the Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan, must be curious about how their sensibilities differ. Shortly after their 2018 feature, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Coens announced they would take a break from collaborating with each other. Joel went on to make The Tragedy of Macbeth, a straightforward Shakespeare adaptation, while Ethan made a documentary about Jerry Lee Lewis and Drive-Away Dolls, a long-gestating road movie about two young women who find themselves in a thorny case of mistaken identity. Given its broad sight gags and comic tone, this film suggests Ethan is the one who pushed the brothers into fare like Raising Arizona or Burn After Reading, whereas Joel took the lead on No Country for Old Men and True Grit.
No matter which sensibility you prefer, the latest film from a Coen brother (singular) is a jolt of energy, a chance for great actors to chew the scenery. But more importantly, Coen and his key collaborator (and longtime wife) Tricia Cooke provide a refreshing depiction of sexuality that finds a political streak in what should be an ordinary celebration of young love.
The film is set in 1999, a period when bedroom behavior was synonymous with national politics, insofar that a sex scandal could sink campaigns. Friends Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) become a part of this milieu entirely by accident. They are young queer women living in Philadelphia, and after Jamie has a big breakup with her girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), she jumps at the opportunity to join Marian on a road trip to Florida. The pair ends up in a junky rental car meant for two low-rent criminals (Joey Slotnick and C.J. Wilson) who are forced to follow the women south. Once Jamie and Marian discover the valuable package in their trunk they immediately sense they are in danger.
Dumb criminals and valuable suitcases are a hallmark of the Coen Brothers’ filmography—there’s a strain of The Big Lebowski to how the Drive-Away Dolls plot unfolds—yet the most important facet to Drive-Away Dolls is its celebration of eccentricity. Qualley borrows a southern accent from her mother, Andie MacDowell, to play a foulmouthed woman with a knack for strange idioms and disarming strangers with florid and funny talk of her sex life. As Marian, Viswanathan is much more uptight, the kind of person who needs someone like Jamie to knock down a boundary or two for her. The pair goes to gay bars and eventually meets up with a college soccer team, all in pursuit of getting Marian laid. With a brazen frankness, Drive-Away Dolls also has more sex scenes than any previous film from the Coens.
Now, it may occur to you that Ethan Coen, a man pushing 70, may not be the best person to tell this particular story. This is where the backstory to Drive-Away Dolls is crucial: Ethan developed the film with Cooke, who co-wrote, produced, and edited the film. Cooke, who describes her marriage to Ethan as “very non-traditional” is also a queer woman, and the lesbian bar scene of the 1990s is something she draws from personal experience. In other words, it feels safe to assume Ethan did not envision this project as a chance to point and stare, and his primary collaborator adds authenticity to the queer scenes depicted in the film. (This is also the first time any Coen brother has hired an intimacy coordinator, Chelsea Pace, who, coincidentally, works locally in the same role at several theaters including Woolly Mammoth and Studio.)
Of course, I have no way of knowing whether this background adds to the film’s authenticity, and yet I hope it is enough to assuage some legitimate concerns. There is a lot of sex in the film, for example, but very little nudity. The chemistry between Qualley and Viswanathan is genuine, even when their friendship develops into romance, which only adds to the film’s building sense of danger. Their dialogue is an intriguing contrast to their pursuers, who obsess over masculinity and gender roles that can only come from a pathological sense of misogyny. By the time Jamie and Marian meet the person who wants the case, one of several surprising cameos in the film, Drive-Away Dolls convincingly makes the case that Jamie’s point of view—honest, matter-of-fact, a little vulgar—is the only way to live.
The original title for Drive-Away Dolls was “Drive-Away Dykes,” something the studio nixed, but the film acknowledges with a cheeky title card when the credits roll. If the new title appeals to a broader audience, it is at the expense of a point of view that Jamie—and eventually Marian—advocate for all along. To deny your identity is to create a self-imposed confinement, something that Marian imposes on a minor scale, while almost all the male characters take the adage “masculinity is a prison” to its natural, deadly conclusion.
All this makes Drive-Away Dolls sound like a women’s studies thesis, and that could not be further from the truth. At under 90 minutes, this comic thriller moves at a breakneck pace, speeding between chase scenes, ransoms, a pile of corpses, and so much more. It moves at such a confident, steady clip, its layers of subtext will reward multiple viewings—unlike a stiff, borderline superfluous adaptation of a Shakespeare tragedy. It seems Joel needs Ethan more than Ethan needs Joel, and since there are reports the brothers are reuniting, maybe this time they should add Cooke as a collaborator of equal weight.
Drive-Away Dolls (rated R, 84 minutes) opens in theaters on Feb. 23.