We don't need to enjoy life, but as long as we're here...
Between 1984 and 2018, we got 18 feature films and two anthology segments by "the Coen Brothers", and despite a wide, eclectic range of genres, stories, and tones, these films collective display an extremely unified creative voice. Between 2021 and 2024, we now have two feature films made by only Joel Coen and only Ethan Coen, and now that we have one film from both sides of that severed creative union to go by, it's remarkable how exactly they seem to have split that unbelievably unified voice in half. So remarkable that I am vaguely unwilling to trust that it's not an extraordinarily high-level experiment they're running on the rest of it. But let's go ahead and take it at face value, and gawk at how precisely Ethan's solo narrative feature debut, Drive-Away Dolls (he had already made his solo directorial debut with a documentary, 2022's Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind), displays exactly the customary "Coensque" traits that weren't present in Joel's solo feature debut in 2021, The Tragedy of Macbeth. What Joel got in the divorce: breathtakingly gorgeous formal precision, which includes but isn't limited to awe-inspiringly precise cinematography; a fascination with the meta-narratives of genres, telling a story that's as more of a breakdown of how stories like that get told than a satisfying exemplar thereof; a generously packed ensemble of recognisable character actors; laser-sharp editing; Frances McDormand* What Ethan got: arch, brittle, highly rhythmic dialogue; wild blasts of extremely vulgar language and violently dopey comedy; cartoony accents; across-the-board great performances from actors willing to look insane and demented on camera and trusting the director to safe them from being ridiculous; editing full of highly visible, playful flourishes. I think the absolutely only point of commonality is that Carter Burwell is still playing both sides, providing both films with spare musical stores based more in a desolate mood than anything like recognisable melody.
Or we could just say "turns out Joel was the formalist and Ethan was the comedian", which gets us most of the way there, but it doesn't explain why Drive-Away Dolls would break so hard from the precise stylistic control of the brothers' films together. I would clarify before going any further that I enjoyed Drive-Away Dolls quite a bit (it's solidly lower-mid-tier by the standards of the Coen combined filmography), even if The Tragedy of Macbeth is much more my speed. It has an exceptionally good ensemble cast, is the main strength, and the regionally-defined weirdoes who have been a treasure in the Coen universe since it began are particularly well-served by the mannered performances given by virtually everybody with speaking lines - I was going to say, "everybody with a named part", except two of the film's best performances are given by Joey Slotnick and C.J. Wilson as a pair of bantering henchman both credited as "The Goon". Very often, it's not so much that the film is funny-funny as that the acting exists in such a wonderfully offbeat mode that it has the aura of funniness, regardless of whether the jokes are hitting with all possible force.
In honesty, they aren't always. I hinted at it, but to say it directly: Drive-Away Dolls is a pretty shaggy, even sloppy movie. I don't think this is accidental, or at least I don't think it's unwitting. If it is the case that Joel was the one machining the brothers' films to an immaculately-engineered form, it's not hard to suppose that Ethan, and his wife Tricia Cooke, who co-wrote the script for this film and serves as its editor, was happy to have a chance to just hang. It's a little surprising to hear such unmistakably Coenesque lines and cadences in the dialogue married to such easygoing, imprecise filmmaking, but it's not really a "bad" thing". There's a feisty energy happening here that hasn't been so visible in any of Ethan's films with his brother since the 1990s, or even further back (this most resembles The Big Lebowski and Raising Arizona, I would say in that order, of anything in the Coens' filmography. Though Margaret Qualley, playing one of the two leads, is very much channeling George Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou?). It's very satisfying and fun and messily human, and part of me feels like we get there, in part, by the film not worrying so much about being "airtight" when it can just let the actors vibe together onscreen.
It is great vibing. The simple version of the story is that Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan - whose most noteworthy credit till now was in being unmemorable in 2018's Blockers, so apparently Ethan also got the "extract remarkable performances from actors who haven't had a chance to show off like this before" gene - are an odd-couple pair of lesbians who travel from Philadelphia to Tallahassee over a few days in 1999. Qualley's Jamie is a Southern-fried collection of slurry energy and casual folk wisdom, attached to casual sex and living without consequences; Viswanathan's Marian is a stick-in-the-mud prude who has an unyielding attachment to rules. We are not reinventing the wheel here. But the two actors are so unbelievably good together, playing Coen & Cooke's stylised, heightened dialogue in two very different registers (Qualley is letting her drawling accent carry her through all of the whorls in the writing like a slow-moving wave crashing into the shore, Viswanathan plays everything with a clipped, rhythmic quality, almost typing out lines with her mouth more than saying them), and then letting the complementary mismatch in their acting bring them to the personality conflict in the characters, rather than just playing the umpteenth version of Felix and Oscar, only now they're lesbians (and I doubt very much this would be close to the first time that variant on the formula, either). The film itself seems to carry two different energies along its entire running time, and while it's still a movie, so it's not at all surprising where this goes or which of the two characters ends up "winning", it never feels pre-ordained that it's going to end up in the inevitable place.
The chemistry between the leads is such a dominant aspect of what Drive-Away Dolls is that the whole rest of the movie can get away, decently well, with basically just shrugging about everything. The actual story? Sure, it exists. Marian has reasons to go to Tallahassee and Jamie has reasons to get the hell out of Philly - she just exploded the latest in a line of relationships, with police officer Sukie (Beanie Feldstein) - so at Jamie's urging the two grab a job taking a "drive-away" down to Florida - that is, a car that has to be delivered someplace and left there. Sounds like a perfect front if you want to smuggle something, and unfortunately, Curlie the drive-away guy (Bill Camp, exquisitely deadpan in a small role) has gotten his wires crossed, which is how Jamie and Marian end up smuggling something that was supposed to be smuggled by the two aforementioned goons, on behalf of crime boss The Chief (Colman Domingo). And so our heroes end up idly shimmying from town to town, unaware that they're being chased by very dangerous men, staying ahead of them mostly because it's impossible for anyone up to and including Marian to predict what zigs and zags Jamie will take on her quest to find the right lesbian bar hiding away in the U.S. South where Marian can get laid.
Unbelievably rote stuff, but it doesn't matter. What makes Drive-Away Dolls worth watching is that it's taking all of its cues from Jamie, and just kind of swinging from place to place, falling backwards into fun ideas and not bothering to try very hard. How much fun one has with this is somewhat contingent on having a high tolerance for some extraordinarily raunchy dialogue and as-far-as-an-R-rating-can-take-us scenes of cunnilingus (the film is basically a parody of an exploitation film), though I think just the sheer force of will Qualley brings to Jamie is enough for it to be fun in a more universal sense. Coen and Cooke are having a lot of fun being silly, both in the script and in the general construction of the thing: Cooke's editing includes some wild scene transitions so unfathomably chintzy and tasteless that I am 100% certain that being tasteless was part of the goal, and it's all meant to be a fun bit of bouncy, high-energy cartoon nonsense. Which gets back to the thing where this does feel awfully slapped together in a lot of ways, and sometimes it can be frustrating how very tossed-off this all is. Cinematographer Ari Wegner is staging some very entertaining compositions, but her lighting has no obvious rhyme or reason, going from motivated realism to pure nonsense color explosions to dramatic shafts of dusky light to hot and flat and not very interesting, without any clear grounding in what the script is up to during those moments. The script itself often feels like an approximation of a story that hopes we won't pay too much attention; sometimes, as in the deeply stupid explanation of what the MacGuffin is, this is pretty obviously on purpose, but sometimes it feels like the writers had an idea at one point in an early draft and got attached to it without remembering why. I have no idea why this is set in 1999, a year that specifically does not fit the one line of dialogue in the whole movie acknowledging a universe outside of this gonzo story (it's the second-to-last line in the film, so it stands out). Production designer Yong Ok Lee and set decorator Nancy Haigh also do not seem to have understood why this was set in 1999, and have put very little effort whatsoever into getting it right.
I mean, I had a good time. But it's not a tight movie, and probably the best thing about it after the leads' chemistry is that it has a remarkably short running time of 84 minutes, including credits, so it doesn't really take a lot of momentum to coast it over the finish line. Coen and Cooke's promise that they have two more of these lined up does not feel like a threat, certainly, but I think they got about as much out of this as they could before the diminishing returns are going to kick in. But in its own right, this works, and having this kind of crude throwback to the '90s indie films that were riffing on '70s exploitation films, all the way here in 2024, is a nice treat. It's easy to call this "just a lark", but it's not just a lark, really; it's rare and wonderful for a lark to be this self-assured and swaggering. Still hoping that the brothers find their way back together at some point, but if Ethan needed to find a new creative partner to get this dizzy, dirty, sweet-natured bauble out of his brain and into the world, it was worth the break.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
*To be fair, it would be weird as hell if, during Joel and Ethan's professional separation, Ethan turned out to be the only one who got to work with Joel's wife.
Or we could just say "turns out Joel was the formalist and Ethan was the comedian", which gets us most of the way there, but it doesn't explain why Drive-Away Dolls would break so hard from the precise stylistic control of the brothers' films together. I would clarify before going any further that I enjoyed Drive-Away Dolls quite a bit (it's solidly lower-mid-tier by the standards of the Coen combined filmography), even if The Tragedy of Macbeth is much more my speed. It has an exceptionally good ensemble cast, is the main strength, and the regionally-defined weirdoes who have been a treasure in the Coen universe since it began are particularly well-served by the mannered performances given by virtually everybody with speaking lines - I was going to say, "everybody with a named part", except two of the film's best performances are given by Joey Slotnick and C.J. Wilson as a pair of bantering henchman both credited as "The Goon". Very often, it's not so much that the film is funny-funny as that the acting exists in such a wonderfully offbeat mode that it has the aura of funniness, regardless of whether the jokes are hitting with all possible force.
In honesty, they aren't always. I hinted at it, but to say it directly: Drive-Away Dolls is a pretty shaggy, even sloppy movie. I don't think this is accidental, or at least I don't think it's unwitting. If it is the case that Joel was the one machining the brothers' films to an immaculately-engineered form, it's not hard to suppose that Ethan, and his wife Tricia Cooke, who co-wrote the script for this film and serves as its editor, was happy to have a chance to just hang. It's a little surprising to hear such unmistakably Coenesque lines and cadences in the dialogue married to such easygoing, imprecise filmmaking, but it's not really a "bad" thing". There's a feisty energy happening here that hasn't been so visible in any of Ethan's films with his brother since the 1990s, or even further back (this most resembles The Big Lebowski and Raising Arizona, I would say in that order, of anything in the Coens' filmography. Though Margaret Qualley, playing one of the two leads, is very much channeling George Clooney in O Brother, Where Art Thou?). It's very satisfying and fun and messily human, and part of me feels like we get there, in part, by the film not worrying so much about being "airtight" when it can just let the actors vibe together onscreen.
It is great vibing. The simple version of the story is that Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan - whose most noteworthy credit till now was in being unmemorable in 2018's Blockers, so apparently Ethan also got the "extract remarkable performances from actors who haven't had a chance to show off like this before" gene - are an odd-couple pair of lesbians who travel from Philadelphia to Tallahassee over a few days in 1999. Qualley's Jamie is a Southern-fried collection of slurry energy and casual folk wisdom, attached to casual sex and living without consequences; Viswanathan's Marian is a stick-in-the-mud prude who has an unyielding attachment to rules. We are not reinventing the wheel here. But the two actors are so unbelievably good together, playing Coen & Cooke's stylised, heightened dialogue in two very different registers (Qualley is letting her drawling accent carry her through all of the whorls in the writing like a slow-moving wave crashing into the shore, Viswanathan plays everything with a clipped, rhythmic quality, almost typing out lines with her mouth more than saying them), and then letting the complementary mismatch in their acting bring them to the personality conflict in the characters, rather than just playing the umpteenth version of Felix and Oscar, only now they're lesbians (and I doubt very much this would be close to the first time that variant on the formula, either). The film itself seems to carry two different energies along its entire running time, and while it's still a movie, so it's not at all surprising where this goes or which of the two characters ends up "winning", it never feels pre-ordained that it's going to end up in the inevitable place.
The chemistry between the leads is such a dominant aspect of what Drive-Away Dolls is that the whole rest of the movie can get away, decently well, with basically just shrugging about everything. The actual story? Sure, it exists. Marian has reasons to go to Tallahassee and Jamie has reasons to get the hell out of Philly - she just exploded the latest in a line of relationships, with police officer Sukie (Beanie Feldstein) - so at Jamie's urging the two grab a job taking a "drive-away" down to Florida - that is, a car that has to be delivered someplace and left there. Sounds like a perfect front if you want to smuggle something, and unfortunately, Curlie the drive-away guy (Bill Camp, exquisitely deadpan in a small role) has gotten his wires crossed, which is how Jamie and Marian end up smuggling something that was supposed to be smuggled by the two aforementioned goons, on behalf of crime boss The Chief (Colman Domingo). And so our heroes end up idly shimmying from town to town, unaware that they're being chased by very dangerous men, staying ahead of them mostly because it's impossible for anyone up to and including Marian to predict what zigs and zags Jamie will take on her quest to find the right lesbian bar hiding away in the U.S. South where Marian can get laid.
Unbelievably rote stuff, but it doesn't matter. What makes Drive-Away Dolls worth watching is that it's taking all of its cues from Jamie, and just kind of swinging from place to place, falling backwards into fun ideas and not bothering to try very hard. How much fun one has with this is somewhat contingent on having a high tolerance for some extraordinarily raunchy dialogue and as-far-as-an-R-rating-can-take-us scenes of cunnilingus (the film is basically a parody of an exploitation film), though I think just the sheer force of will Qualley brings to Jamie is enough for it to be fun in a more universal sense. Coen and Cooke are having a lot of fun being silly, both in the script and in the general construction of the thing: Cooke's editing includes some wild scene transitions so unfathomably chintzy and tasteless that I am 100% certain that being tasteless was part of the goal, and it's all meant to be a fun bit of bouncy, high-energy cartoon nonsense. Which gets back to the thing where this does feel awfully slapped together in a lot of ways, and sometimes it can be frustrating how very tossed-off this all is. Cinematographer Ari Wegner is staging some very entertaining compositions, but her lighting has no obvious rhyme or reason, going from motivated realism to pure nonsense color explosions to dramatic shafts of dusky light to hot and flat and not very interesting, without any clear grounding in what the script is up to during those moments. The script itself often feels like an approximation of a story that hopes we won't pay too much attention; sometimes, as in the deeply stupid explanation of what the MacGuffin is, this is pretty obviously on purpose, but sometimes it feels like the writers had an idea at one point in an early draft and got attached to it without remembering why. I have no idea why this is set in 1999, a year that specifically does not fit the one line of dialogue in the whole movie acknowledging a universe outside of this gonzo story (it's the second-to-last line in the film, so it stands out). Production designer Yong Ok Lee and set decorator Nancy Haigh also do not seem to have understood why this was set in 1999, and have put very little effort whatsoever into getting it right.
I mean, I had a good time. But it's not a tight movie, and probably the best thing about it after the leads' chemistry is that it has a remarkably short running time of 84 minutes, including credits, so it doesn't really take a lot of momentum to coast it over the finish line. Coen and Cooke's promise that they have two more of these lined up does not feel like a threat, certainly, but I think they got about as much out of this as they could before the diminishing returns are going to kick in. But in its own right, this works, and having this kind of crude throwback to the '90s indie films that were riffing on '70s exploitation films, all the way here in 2024, is a nice treat. It's easy to call this "just a lark", but it's not just a lark, really; it's rare and wonderful for a lark to be this self-assured and swaggering. Still hoping that the brothers find their way back together at some point, but if Ethan needed to find a new creative partner to get this dizzy, dirty, sweet-natured bauble out of his brain and into the world, it was worth the break.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
*To be fair, it would be weird as hell if, during Joel and Ethan's professional separation, Ethan turned out to be the only one who got to work with Joel's wife.
