After ‘Drive-Away Dolls,’ Ethan Coen Should Never Direct a Film Alone Again
“Love is a sleigh ride to Hell,” reads a graffiti message in Drive-Away Dolls, and so too is this comedy, which suggests that Joel and Ethan Coen’s long-time creative partnership was not an equal one. Directed solely by Ethan, who co-wrote its screenplay with wife Tricia Cooke, this dire attempt at a zany lesbian road-trip saga strives so hard for hilarity that its failure in that regard is impressively depressing. Aiming for ribald and risqué and coming up with only ruinous humorlessness, it may be the longest 84 minutes anyone will spend in a theater this year.
Set in 1999—because its women-on-the-run story would crumble even more calamitously (if, mercifully, more quickly) if its protagonists had smartphones—Drive-Away Dolls (February 23, in theaters) opens with an answering machine message from Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) that interrupts Jamie (Margaret Qualley) performing cunnilingus on one of her infinite paramours. Jamie and this evening’s lover ooh, aah, and argh with cartoonish abandon; the madcap atmosphere is already so hysterical, and completely established, that the film sabotages any chance at building amusing momentum or mania. Hitting its tonal peak right out of the gate, it can only maintain its over-the-top exaggeration. That it does, which might be more pleasurable if Coen and Cooke’s script didn’t boast one off-puttingly grating caricature after another.
At the top of that list is Jamie, who, despite residing in the City of Brotherly Love, is from Fort Worth. How or why Jamie relocated to Philadelphia is a detail too trivial for Drive-Away Dolls; its prime fixation is on Jamie’s thick and unconvincing Texas drawl, her habit of saying cute-pie-isms like “honey darlin’” and “honey babe” and “honey doll,” and talking incessantly and graphically about her lesbian lust. Qualley is a charming actress in the right role, but this isn’t it. Coen and Cooke ask her to ham it up as a motormouth whose two defining traits are that she’s obsessed with screwing as many people as possible and she doesn’t like to read. The result is that Jamie comes off as a smug airhead and, worse, like someone pretending to be wild and kooky both in and out of the sack. The more she tries to be a freewheeling sexual dynamo who’s eager to force others to see—and therefore accept—her homosexuality, the more she resonates as a pose masquerading as an actual character.