Getaway Car
After it was announced that the Coen Brothers were going to be going their separate professional ways, at least for a while, in the wake of the release of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Joel Coen went on to make The Tragedy of Macbeth, an adaptation of the classic Shakespeare play that was a solid and well-crafted work that largely eschewed most of their familiar stylistic touches—it felt more in line with the Shakespeare cinema of Orson Welles than anything in the official Coen canon. Now Ethan Coen has come up with his first solo venture (not counting a 2022 documentary on Jerry Lee Lewis that was never released theatrically), Drive-Away Dolls, and right from the start, it is clear that he has chosen a slightly different artistic path, electing instead to tell a loopily lurid shaggy dog tale that plays like an extended homage to such female-centric exploitation film classics as Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Assault of the Killer Bimbos that, if it weren’t for the fact that he has been toying with the idea for doing it since the early 2000s, it might almost seem like a deliberate rebuke to his brother’s project. That said, while perhaps lacking in such things as subtlety, sophistication and quiet dignity, the resulting film is an undeniable blast to watch, arguably the funniest—and certainly the horniest—comedy to hit theaters since Bottoms.
Set in 1999, the film opens in Pittsburgh as two longtime lesbian friends, the free-spirited Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and the infinitely more reserved Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), are bemoaning the states of their respective love lives—Jamie’s wandering eye has just earned her the boot from her current girlfriend, cop Sukie (Beanie Feldstein) while Marian’s has been dormant for far too long. Seeking a break, they decide to take a road trip to Tallahassee for a change of scenery using a car acquired from a drive-away delivery service to get them there. Although they are tasked with getting the car to its destination by the next day, Jamie inevitably has other ideas and before long, she has them hitting lesbian bars and canoodling with members of a woman’s soccer team, events that eventually lead to them missing their deadline and temporarily landing one of them in jail.
What they don’t realize is that the car they were given to drive was supposed to have been given to a trio of criminals—the smooth-talking Chief (Colman Domingo) and his goons Arliss (Joey Slotnick) and Flint (C.J. Wilson)—who were meant to transport a couple of packages hidden in the trunk to an unknown entity in Tallahassee. Once Jamie and Marian discover the cargo they have been unwittingly hauling around, they decide to contact the interested party themselves in order to hand over the items in exchange for a million bucks. To reveal exactly the contents of the trunk or why they are of such importance would, of course, be a massive spoiler, so instead, all I will say is that the ensuing hijinks soon spiritless out of control in increasingly bizarre ways and among those caught up in the story are characters played by the likes of Pedro Pascal, Matt Damon and Miley Cyrus, the latter in a role that, depending on your personal view towards her, will surprise you either a lot or not at all.
While The Tragedy of Macbeth seemed to go out of its way to avoid the kind of touches that one normally associates with the films of the Coen Brothers—ranging from audacious visuals to narratives chock-full of oddball characters, distinctively written dialogue and wild plot digressions—Drive-Away Dolls pretty much revels in them. The extremely broad visual style is reminiscent of the cheerfully cartoonish excesses of Raising Arizona while the screenplay by Coen and Tricia Cooke is in the shaggy dog style of The Big Lebowski in the way that it seems to start like a standard genre piece only to turn in a weirdly endearing character study that is spiked with moments of goofball raunch. Of course, those coming into the film hoping for something on the more sophisticated side may find themselves put out by the deliberate crudity on display on all fronts, ranging from the level of humor on display to the way that the storyline kind of peters out towards the end. On the other hand, others—and I include myself in this—may recognize the aforementioned crudity but be too busy laughing to worry too much about it.
Coen presents the material with a lot of flair and energy and crudely effective humor—the kind that might be described in reviews as “Coenesque” if it had come from literally any other filmmaker marking their feature debut—but what really drives it in the end are the performances by Qualley and Viswanathan in the two leads. On their own, they have each proven to be among the most reliable scene stealers of late—Qualley in such projects as The Nice Guys, Fosse/Verdon and, of course, as the Manson girl that Brad Pitt picks up hitchhiking in Once Upon a Time. . . in Hollywood, and Viswanathan in Blockers, Bad Education and Miracle Workers—and together, they make for a truly inspired team. Of the course of the film, they develop a crackpot comedic rhythm that is so winning that even if you stripped the film of all of the surrounding weirdness and just focused on their disparate personalities—Julia’s lustful impulsiveness and Marian’s repression regarding practically everything—and the unexpected developments in their relationship over the course of their journey, it would still be a joy to watch the two of them playing off of each other in increasingly delightful fashion. The supporting cast is also a lot of fun as they tear into the florid dialogue and strange situations with undeniable zeal. Granted, those lured into seeing the film solely due to the presence of Pascal and Damon may be a bit disappointed by their relatively brief screen time but trust me, while their appearances may not last long, they are certainly memorable.
Drive-Away Dolls is fast, funny and occasionally quite sexy romp through junky B-movie cliches and while it may not necessarily add up to much more than a trifle when all is said and done, it at least has the courtesy to be an enormously entertaining one. After a few weeks of increasingly lumpy and logy cinematic misfires that at times seemed to be going out of their way to not provide viewers with actual entertainment, here is one that simply wants to take them for a wild ride for 90 minutes or so and does so with a lot of brash wit, style and, yes, even charm. This film may be trash, I suppose, but it is the kind of wildly entertaining trash that I, for one, would take over the typical overscaled spectacle any day of the week.