Coen brother goes solo on raunchy lesbian road trip
THE Coen brothers, on the evidence of their first films made apart after 18 cork- ers together, have split in decidedly different directions.
At any rate, there isn’t much common ground between Ethan Coen’s DriveAway Dolls, a bawdy lesbian road-trip crime-comedy, and big brother Joel’s glowering 2021 picture The Tragedy Of Macbeth. Except, I suppose, that they’re both about relationships, and maybe it’s possible that Lady M had a lesbian road trip in her, had things in and around Birnam Wood turned out otherwise. Drive-Away Dolls is set in 1999 and begins in Philadelphia, where Jamie (Margaret Qualley), a brash, brazen Texan who calls everyone ‘sugar-sweet’ and ‘honey-doll’ in the kind of accent a jalapeno corn fritter might have if it could talk, teams up with her genteel, uptight friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) to drive to Tallahassee in Florida.
The cheapest way of doing it is through a ‘drive-away’ agency, where you state your destination and hope that it tallies with a place to which a third party wants their car driven. That’s how I once got from Charlottesville, Virginia to Tucson, Arizona, not that I had a severed head in the boot, at least not knowingly.
The women don’t know either. They’re both happy to get out of town, Jamie because she’s just split up with her angry cop girlfriend (Beanie Feldstein), Marian because she’s eternally single and frustrated at work, fed up with rebuffing the advances of a male colleague. He’s unaware of her sexual preferences, although, for Marian, chance would be a fine thing. Chance, of course, will duly come her way.
In terms of Jamie and Marian’s relationship, Coen and his wife, Tricia Cooke, with whom he wrote the screenplay, keep the trajectory straight and predictable. The pair are diametric opposites — one taking a drunken one-night stand back to their twin room in a motel, where the other is sitting up in bed ploughing through a Henry James novel — so think of rom-com cliches and draw your own conclusions.
In one way it’s to the director’s credit that the plot, involving that decapitated head and a mysterious briefcase wanted by a shady senator (Matt Damon, right), seems less interesting than the women’s friendship. But in another way it’s not.
The crime element is so farcical, and a couple of squabbling henchmen so derivative of so many other films (not least by the Coen brothers themselves), that it feels superfluous, a sometimes tiresome distraction.
In short, Jamie and Marian visit a world-weary drive-away broker (the always-splendid Bill Camp), who has been told to expect two people asking to take a vehicle to Tallahassee. So unwittingly they become the couriers of ‘goods’ secretly stashed in the car, leading to a frantic hunt when the bad guys find out. Needless to add, the action has to be set in an age before iPhones and sophisticated satellite mapping.
Anyway, there are notunpleasing echoes in the ensuing pursuit of Some Like It Hot, Thelma & Louise and any number of Coen movies, including No Country For Old Men and O Brother, Where Art Thou?. I dare say that a few Sapphic soft-porn flicks might spring to mind, too, if I was any kind of expert. This film is downright raunchy in parts, although anything too graphic is swerved by snappy editing (by Cooke) and brief interludes of swirling psychedelia. In truth, there are also some pricelessly witty lines (I enjoyed Jamie’s explanation that ‘Henry James is in fact the reason ah don’t read’), but too many others that strive too forcefully for whimsy, as when one hapless henchman lectures the other about savouring the stuff of life. Still, it’s all contained within an admirably taught 84 minutes, and Viswanathan and Qualley are never less than engaging. The latter, by the way, is the daughter of Andie MacDowell, whose best-known film might be evoked by an alternative title for this one, not that I wish to give any clue as to the contents of the briefcase: Four Phalluses And No Funeral.