A Boomer Bottoms, Drive-Away Dolls has an overeager air, a sense of trying to catch up after arriving late to a party (to which you might not have been invited). It’s a strange mashup of contemporary queer signposts and genre shenanigans from an earlier era, all filtered through the off-kilter lens of the Coen brothers. Or, at least one of them. In the wake of his brother Joel’s solo debut as a feature director, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Ethan Coen offers this labor of a lark, which he co-wrote with his wife, Tricia Cooke. The film follows two young women who agree to drive a car from Philadelphia to Tallahassee, unaware that a mysterious criminal syndicate is in pursuit of a briefcase in the trunk. Jamie (Margaret Qualley), a loquacious hedonist who has just broken up with her girlfriend, sees the trip as a chance to hook up with as many women as possible. Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), while attracted to women in theory, is far less experienced and far more reserved—so much so that you never really buy these two as genuine friends. Or even, really, as Coen Characters. If you were to turn the dial on certain of the brothers’ movies just one notch further—Raising Arizona, say, or The Big Lebowski—those films would come across as grating. Fittingly, those are two of the more obvious Coen touchstones here (along with their debut, Blood Simple). In Drive-Away Dolls, almost every line is squeezed a bit too hard for cleverness, while the acts of violence frequently cross over into callousness. And although Qualley’s verbal dexterity is impressive (even if it owes a lot to Holly Hunter’s Edwina in Raising Arizona), her performance mostly made me eager to see what she might do in the future, with stronger comic material. There’s a one-liner about Democrats near the end that’s beneath both her and her character. But not a Boomer.
(2/22/2024)
