Recently, for the first time since they started making movies together in 1984, we’ve been able to guess what each Coen Brother might bring to their cinematic partnership. The Brothers, Joel and Ethan, who have collaborated constantly since their debut feature Blood Simple, have spent the last few years making films apart. Joel made the fascinating, heady nouveau-expressionist adaptation The Tragedy of Macbeth in 2021 and (in addition to a propulsive documentary about Jerry Lee Lewis), Ethan made Drive-Away Dolls, the droll crimey road-trip lesbian buddy comedy which hits theaters this weekend.
The Brothers, who are even more secretive about their process than they are about their lives, have not shared how they have come to make the films they have. Their oeuvre is especially fascinating because it’s a real variety pack of genre and tone. Sometimes they make transcendent, gritty masterpieces like Inside Llewyn Davis, Fargo, True Grit, Miller’s Crossing, and No Country for Old Men. Other times, they make strange, brilliant experiments like Barton Fink, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. They have made unparalleled, genre-sampling comedies like The Big Lebowski, Raising Arizona, Hail Caesar!, and A Serious Man. They’ve made films that you might not have heard of, like The Man Who Wasn’t There and The Hudsucker Proxy. And they’ve made a handful of films that are generally thought of as weird, frenetic, and (for lack of a better phrase), not great: The Ladykillers, Intolerable Cruelty, and Burn After Reading. (The thing about the Coen Brothers is that their films feel endlessly reshuffle-able in these groups according to personal preference; this is mine.) They’ve also written movies of every possible type and at many levels of quality: the underwhelming caper Gambit, the uninteresting Suburbicon, the crass heist film Bad Santa, the sweeping war drama Unbroken, and the serviceable Cold War thriller Bridge of Spies.
The question of “what makes a Coen Brothers’ movie?” can’t really be answered in any other terms than Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s, in his decision in the 1964 Jacobellis v. Ohio pornography case: “I know it when I see it.” You do, too. There’s probably some sort of formula, but the type of movie the Coen Brothers seem to make is, to me, one that smartly blends fathoms of knowledge about cinematic and literary history, an appreciation for many different eras and kinds of filmmaking, and a sense that the only audience they really care about is themselves. I’ve never seen another series of films that seem, so much, to be made for the enjoyment of the filmmakers alone. Anyone else’s approval seems like a convenient bonus.
So what does it mean to watch half of a Coen Brothers’ movie? Rather, to watch a whole film and notice how similar it feels to a Coen Brothers’ film, except for a few absent things? After watching Drive-Away Dolls, I felt safe to at least joke that Joel supplies the noirish, literary investments, and Ethan supplies the buddy-comedy elements and whatever in their corpus passes for bawdiness.
But actually, just as much as I could not help but feel, and wonder about, the Coen-ness of Drive Away Dolls, I also recognized that this was a very new kind of movie to have their name attached, and I found it fascinating to watch that develop.
Ethan directed and co-wrote the film with Tricia Cooke, his wife, who co-produced it. The story, which takes place in 1999, is about two young women, the free-spirited Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and the uptight Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), who go on a road trip together from Philadelphia to Tallahassee. They’re friends, as odd-couple as it gets, and they’re both looking to get out of town; Jamie wants to go find herself after being caught cheating on her girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), while Marian, still single after breaking up with her girlfriend three years ago, plans to go visit her aunt.
They rent a car from a Drive-Away, a service that pairs cars bound for certain cities with people who plan to drive to those cities anyway, and begin their plans to head down South. In more ways than one. Marian wants to get to driving; Jaime wants to get Marian laid (and get laid herself), and plans a bunch of side trips to lesbian bars and parties. But both women don’t know that their car is concealing contraband goods—or even that these items are being hotly pursued by a mysterious group of individuals who desperately want them back. That group’s leader is Colman Domingo (ever-suave, but dangerous), and he sends two stooges (Joey Slotnick and C.J. Wilson) to track the girls down.
What follows is a lighthearted story of pursuit and commitment that unfolds in parts as a madcap crime comedy and a genuinely sweet romance, with psychedelic interludes aping 70s lesbian sexploitation films. It might seem difficult to pull off all of this well, especially in a film whose runtime is a taut 84 minutes, but the film’s pacing is fine; it bounces along satisfactorily, propelled, mostly, by the earnest and game performances of its cast, especially Qualley (who has been giving the extra-hard assignment of speaking with a deep Texas drawl), Feldstein, Plotnick, and Domingo. Additional small performances by Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, and Bill Camp pepper the film with amusing moments.
Critics will doubtlessly be divided on this film, but I hope even those who don’t care for the film acknowledge how, in parlance of our times, it “commits to the bit.” Its real title, censored for mass distribution, is Drive-Away Dykes. This isn’t a film which cops out by queerbaiting its audience or pussyfooting around the promised sexual themes. There are elements of the plot that are extremely goofy, but the film unapologetically grips onto them and uses them to lean all the way into pulp, wryly and jocularly paying homage to the lesbian grindhouse cinematic canon while also boldly attempting the first modern, mainstream, softcore lesbian sex comedy.
This feels rather vanguard for a Coen movie of any kind, since the movies made by the Brothers feel generally uninterested in sex even when their narratives call for it (even though sometimes, as in Burn After Reading, they are interested in phalluses even when their narratives don’t call for it at all). Perhaps this is due to the influence from Cooke, who identifies as gay and wrote the draft for Drive-Away Dolls many years ago.
There are a few moments that break up the film’s momentum, a few things that seem designed to get laughs at the expense of narrative and tonal coherence. The experience is sometimes just as erratic as the story is erotic. Drive-Away Dolls is not perfect, by any means. For instance, without going into spoilers, I’ll say that the film takes its protagonists in certain directions that I don’t quite think are supported by their relationship as we see it. Nonetheless, it is a very intrepid, gutsy, good-natured endeavor with many genuinely enjoyable elements. And, even if you think it comes together or not, you can’t deny that it makes quite a splash.
