The plural of brother is brothers, obviously, but does it necessarily follow that the word brother is singular? I suppose it does, for all that it carries with it the implied existence of a sibling, one way or another. It seems odd to talk in general terms of ‘a brother’ except in the ecclesiastical sense. Yes, I know: this sort of philological rambling marks a new departure for the blog, but then again the same is true of the film being advertised as Drive-Away Dolls, directed by Coen brother Ethan Coen.
The Coens haven’t made a film since 2018 and apparently this is because, at their age (one is seventy this year, the other is on the way there) it’s less fun than it used to be, especially as the production problems on their last couple of films were particularly vexing. We hear this quite a lot from veteran film-makers these days – Steven Soderbergh retired for a bit, we heard similar sentiments from David Cronenberg, too. But it seems a film has come along which Ethan Coen feels sufficiently motivated about to get him back behind the camera (though he has suggested he effectively co-wrote and directed the film with his wife). It must be something highly significant and worthy of his time.
Or perhaps not. The ‘actual’ title of Drive-Away Dolls, when it eventually appears, contains language likely to cause shock and offence along with the name of a distinguished dead American writer, whose literary estate might take exception to it apparently being used to sell a movie. Especially when it’s about…
Hum, how do I communicate the essential nature of Drive-Away Dolls without spoiling some of the surprises (if that’s the right word) of the movie? This is a real poser. There’s a very fine line between a clue and a dead giveaway here, I’m afraid. The main characters are Jamie (Margaret Qualley), a free-spirited and amiably promiscuous lesbian from Philadelphia, who at the top of the film gets dumped by her cop girlfriend (Beanie Feldstein); and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), a reserved and introverted young woman (also a Philadelphia lesbian, in case you were wondering) who is Jamie’s exact opposite in many ways. For no very rigorously explored reason the two of them end up driving from Philadelphia to Tallahassee together, in a car they’re supposed to be delivering. (The film is set in 1999 – I’ve no idea if businesses like this still exist.)
Needless to say, things don’t go to plan, mainly because there’s a mix-up at the drive-away office and they end up with a car containing a number of unusual items which are the property of some shady underworld figures. This wouldn’t be a major issue, were it not for the car breaking down and them looking in the boot to find… ah, what am I supposed to do at this point? Spoil the whole movie?
Look, Miley Cyrus cameos in the movie as a fictionalised version of a real-life artist known as Cynthia Plaster Caster. The nature of how she got this name, specifically what exactly she was making plaster casts of, is crucial to the unfolding plot of the movie. So go and google her if you want to get a better sense of just what kind of film this is.
Perhaps I should just say that Drive-Away Dolls oscillates between being a raucous and fairly explicit sex comedy, a road movie with a not-unaffecting romance at its heart, and a deadpan pastiche of noirish thriller conventions. Sometimes it is doing more than one of these things in the same scene. Needless to say, it takes a very deft touch born of natural talent and long years of experience to carry off this kind of mix of genres and tones successfully. And, perhaps surprisingly, as of this moment it appears that it’s a deft touch that Ethan Coen just doesn’t quite have.
The end result of all this is that you end up watching a bizarrely uneven movie where nothing quite seems to hang together – some of the performances are pitched a bit too big, the direction is just a bit too knowingly mannered in places, a lot of the comedy is too broad. Drive-Away Dolls is substantially less than the 90 minute length which tends to be the bare minimum for conventional feature releases these days, and I would assume this is because it has been ruthlessly hacked back so that the bits that really don’t work are being kept away from paying audiences. Even so, it’s like watching an offbeat indie road movie which has been possessed by the spirit of an obscene cartoon.
Which is not to say that it’s a complete waste of time – it’s certainly wildly uneven, but that just means some bits of it are better than others, and in this case some of those better bits are genuinely rather good. Qualley’s performance is initially gratingly over-the-top, but as the film progresses both she and Viswanathan produce quite engaging turns; the strand about the relationship of the two protagonists is certainly one of the movie’s strengths. And I must confess there’s a sort of inspired madness about the caper-thriller plotline mixed in with this – provocative doesn’t really start to do this justice, it’s essentially a rather strange and filthy joke, and how they managed to persuade Matt Damon to turn up and cameo in it I have no idea. But cameo he does, and his performance is as solid as ever.
And it does have a sort of deranged upbeat energy about it, which is significant as apparently Coen and his wife wanted to do a movie about a queer romance which didn’t operate in terms of the standard conventions – nobody comes out and (possibly another spoiler here) nobody dies at the end. The film is certainly successful in this, but I’ve no idea how positively the film has been received by the East Coast LGBT community – my gut instinct, given that the directors are both heterosexual, along with at least one of the leads, is that there might have been a degree of suspicion about it, as it could be seen as slightly exploitative. I don’t think it is – this is one area at least in which the film exhibits some signs of restraint. I still think this is a film with serious flaws, but I must confess that by the end I was enjoying it much more than being annoyed by it. I’d still hesitate before giving it an unqualified recommendation, though.
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