Review: Drive-Away Dolls – Reverse away

Directed by Ethan Coen
Starring Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, Colman Dimingo, Matt Damon

5/10

The Coen brothers have created some of the best American modern movies, but with each now having created their own directorial solo efforts, Joel with The Tragedy of Macbeth and Ethan with this film, it shows what a great deal is missing when the two separate. Drive-Away Dolls feels much less like a Coen brothers movie and more like a cartoon with an incredibly contrived story and uncaring nature.

Having just broken up with her girlfriend, Jamie (Margaret Qualley) decides to go on a road trip, roping her roommate Mariam (Geraldine Viswanathan) along for it. But due to unfortunate circumstances, they end up taking a rental car that holds a briefcase with very sensitive material in it, and so Chief (Colman Dimingo) and his muscle men hunt them down to retrieve it.

There’s an extremely unserious sensibility to this film. Sure, it’s a comedy, but the film still tries to get you to engage somewhat with its characters, even though they act like paper-thin cartoonish caricatures. People are shot in front of our two leads, or they stumble upon a decapitated head, yet none of it really affects them, and they continue on like nothing’s happening. It’s not good when the characters in a film don’t appear to experience any growth, characterisation, or even hardly any reaction to the plot around them. This couple seems pretty much the same as they were when the film started, which would be fine if that were the film’s snide attempt, but it isn’t.

The nicest thing to be said about Drive-Away Dolls is that, despite being a bad film, it’s still a funny film. There’s plenty of attempts at humour; some of them can be cringeworthy, but others really land with a cracking punchline, a very amusing character moment, or are tied in with the film’s very unabashed portrayal of lesbian culture.

But it is incredibly hard to take this film, or any of its characters, seriously. It’d be astonishing to compare such a lazy, paper-weight film to a monumental work like Fargo or No Country for Old Men. Now, both Joel and Ethan Coen have made their career lows with their first solo directorial efforts, so here’s hoping they get back together to continue creating the stunning works they so consistently did before.

DAVID MORGAN-BROWN