Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls Hits a Few Too Many Speedbumps: Review

The Pitch: It’s 1999 and Jamie (Margaret Qualley) has given up on love. Having fumbled her latest relationship with yet another girlfriend (Beanie Feldstein), the thrill-seeking wild child is ready for change – luckily for her, her uptight best friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) is about to go visit her aunt in Tallahassee. Jamie sees this as a perfect endeavor on which to invite herself along, while the bookish Marian reluctantly obliges.

But, thanks to a mix-up at the hands of the local drive-away dealership owner, Jamie and Marian end up traversing down the east coast in a vehicle originally intended for – of course – a crew of incompetent criminals, and in the Volvo’s trunk is a severed head and a steel suitcase. What’s inside that suitcase leads our two protagonists down a journey of self-discovery that winds up at the brink of a public scandal. Though it’s the first narrative feature film that Ethan Coen has made without his usual creative partner, it still has the sort of darkly cheeky, crime-ridden storyline you’d expect from the Brothers Coen.

A Not-So-Buddy Comedy: The character set-up of Drive-Away Dolls follows a formula indebted to flicks like Jennifer’s Body and Booksmart and countless sitcoms before it; a free-spirited loose cannon tries to convince their unlikely BFF that they need to loosen up a little. In this case, Jamie is the master seductress shamelessly canvassing the local lesbian bar for her latest one-night stand, while Marian is the type to hold the wall, white-knuckling her drink, wearing the same suit she wore to work that day.

But Coen and his wife Tricia Cooke’s script doesn’t offer the sort of nuance needed in order to establish Jamie and Marian as believable friends. The two screenwriters have said that they began writing the first moments of Drive-Away Dolls before even they knew how the film would end, and while that leads the story to some truly unpredictable places, that hastiness shows through in the protagonists’ bond.

And it’s not that Qualley and Viswanathan are miscast or poor performers – their on-screen chemistry allows for some bright moments, while Qualley in particular feels like a natural fit in the comedic role. But it’s unclear how long Jamie and Marian have even known each other, and even more so unclear how they’ve managed to stay close friends when their relationship isn’t the healthiest.

The lack of backstory would be more forgivable if Jamie and Marian’s friendship was a good one. Jamie, on numerous occasions, pushes Marian into uncomfortable situations that go beyond basic “loosen up” endeavors; in one scene, Jamie stumbles back to her and Marian’s hotel room with her latest fling, forcing Marian (and her Henry James novel, mind you) out in the middle of the night. In another, Jamie drags Marian to a party hosted by a college women’s basketball team, where Marian is subjected to unwanted advances and eventually storms out in a panic. It’s a particularly frustrating artistic blunder that makes our protagonists’ friendship difficult to believe, and the movie as a whole less compelling as a result.

Drive-Away Dolls (Focus Features)