One Head and Briefcase Full of… Something

The Coen Brothers have a very specific style of filmmaking. They don’t tend to go in for the flashy, blockbuster-style storytelling, instead focusing on smaller, more intimate tales of idiots doing idiotic things and getting their comeuppance. The Coens love documenting tales of the stupid, filming their characters in loving ways. From the likes of Raising Arizona to Fargo and Burn After Reading, it’s clear that the Coens enjoy finding stories about dumb people doing dumb things, and then building rich, intricate stories around their lives and foibles. The Coens can make interesting films about these characters that you end up wanting to see over and over again despite how dumb the people inside these movies can be.

Since 2021 the Coens have been working separately, not making their films together (unlike the previous three-plus decades of filmmaking before where they always worked together). Joel went off to make a Shakespeare adaptation based on Macbeth while Ethan has done a documentary on Jerry Lee Lewis followed by a couple of works that tightly and neatly fit into the standard Coen formula. Drive-Away Dolls is the first of these solo comedies, a light and breezy adventure that clearly is working in the style Ethan knows very well.

Despite this, though, the film lacks a certain spark that was prevalent through the films made by the brothers together. It has the same style, the same kookiness, and same types of characters, but it doesn’t quite come together. The previous films were worked on together by the brothers, with each of them clearly complimenting the other and adding to the ideas and direction the film took. Without both brothers being on board it feels like Drive-Away Dolls is missing that core collaboration that helped make the other works fly. It’s a film that has good ideas, and fun moments, but that never really comes together the way you expect a Coen film to gel.

The movie focuses on two lesbians, Jamie from Texas (Margaret Qualley) and Marian from Tallahassee (Geraldine Viswanathan), who have been best friends in Philadelphia for years. After Jamie breaks up with her cop girlfriend, Suki (Beanie Feldstein), she decides (on her own) to join Marian on a road trip down to Tallahassee to visit with Marian’s grandmother. The facilitate the trip, they go to a car drive-away, which lets people that need a ride deliver cars to various destinations, acting like one-way rentals for people on a budget.

Unfortunately for Jamie and Marian, the car they’ve picked up from Curlie’s Drive-Away was actually meant for a couple of bag men, Arliss (Joey Slotnick) and Flint (C. J. Wilson), and because the car was supposed to go to Tallahassee, the girls are going to Tallahassee, and Curlie (Bill Camp) didn’t know any better. Now these criminals are on the tail of the girls, following them on their road trip through the back roads of the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, and if they catch up to the ladies it could spell big trouble for Jamie and Marian… especially after they find out what’s in their trunk.

The Coens got famous writing tales of criminals doing botched capers and then paying the price for their stupidity. You can feel that same story trying to come together here, in Drive-Away Dolls, but the pieces don’t fit and really don’t work well together. A big part of that reason is that the caper in question isn’t even revealed until two-thirds of the way into the film, with the movie keeping everything vague up until that point, and even then what the criminals want feels very low-stakes and not especially interesting. This isn’t a high-stakes game with potentially deadly consequences, not really, no matter how much the film wants to play it otherwise.

I’m not going to spoil what, specifically, the crime in question is about, but I will say that this is the kind of plotline that could have easily been handled with a simple conversation and without the need for violence or indiscretion. This is plainly obvious to the audience, especially once the actual full story is revealed, but the characters and the story never quite clue into this. Instead, it makes a big, convoluted deal out of everything. Someone dies, other people are chased, there’s backstabbing and front shooting and all kinds of silliness, but the film (despite even setting up that the criminals can be reasonable people) never quite gets its act together.

I think this speaks to a failing of the story itself. There just aren’t big enough stakes in Drive-Away Dolls to merit the kind of storytelling Ethan Coen is used to. In Fargo, the crime that kicks everything off is a kidnapping that leads to murder. Rasing Arizona is about the kidnapping of a baby. Burn After Reading is all about blackmail and government secrets. But for Drive-Away Dolls (again, without spoiling anything), the main plot barely feels like a crime the goons in any of those films would do as a side-project to a side-project while handling the main caper that actually took up their films. It just doesn’t work.

I noted at the start that these two main characters in the film are lesbians, and that content is a large part of their character arcs. The two go off on a long, sapphic weekend (mostly at Jamie’s instigation) and the film most of the time seems more interested in their sexual adventures than the actual crime caper at the heart of it all. I actually think that the film would have been better if it was just a road trip movie about these two characters discovering themselves and having comedic adventures along the East Coast without the need for the usual Coen crime story going on alongside. These are two detailed, fully realized characters (as the Coens are good at crafting) and their interactions on the trip are the best parts of the film.

The two leads in the movie, Qualley and Viswanathan, have natural chemistry and are very comfortable together. They’re able to sell their friendship between the two while also getting to the core of each lady’s foibles. Qualley is saddled with a very silly Texas accent that does nothing for her character, I will note, but otherwise I think these two are fantastic together. I could have watched more of them having awkward adventures up and down the countryside, and the fact that the film doesn’t realize this, focusing on them more, does a great disservice to its own story.

End of the day, this does feel like a film that desperately wanted to be a Coen film without realizing it should have been something else altogether. Ethan Coen gets great performances out of his actors, and he still is able to handle the work of making a polished, handsome film. But the core spark, that need to see this film, is lacking. Whatever magical formula he had worked out with his brother needs to be found again, whether with Joel or someone else. On his own, Ethan wasn’t able to make this film all it could have been, and the end result is a lackluster copy of better Coen films.