Drive-Away Dolls

Director: Ethan Coen (USA, UK). Year of Release: 2024

Philadelphia, 1999. A man sits on his own in Cicero’s bar clutching a metal suitcase and constantly glancing at his watch. His expected meet-up clearly isn’t coming so he asks for the bill. As he leaves the bar, he hears steps following him and dodges into a dark alley. Behind him, he sees the waiter who just served him. As the waiter approaches, the man sees no way out of the alley. He picks up a dustbin lid to defend himself, but the waiter roughly throws it aside.

There is a great sight gag in the opening scene of Drive-Away Dolls. As the waiter embeds a corkscrew into the man’s right temple, he realises that pulling it out would remove large parts of his head. So he gently attempts to unscrew the corkscrew. As he is doing this, the waiter thrusts a second corkscrew into his left temple. The man falls to the ground. The waiter wrests the suitcase from him and passes it on to people who throw it into a passing car.

Cut to: a bedroom at the other end of town. Two women are having hot sex, when the phone rings. They let it go to answer phone, and the woman on the other end asks if Jamie is coming out tonight. We then see a conservatively dressed woman in a generic office put down the phone and ward off a co-worker trying to ask her out. Later that evening she makes the same phone call and gets a similar response.

Cut to: a lesbian bar where the similarly dressed Marian does not look like she’s out for a wild night. Jamie, on the other hand, seems up for anything, much to the disgust of her soon to be ex-partner, Sukie. Long story short, by the end of the night, Jamie has a black eye and is asking Marian for help moving out of the flat she shared with Sukie. When Marian says that she’s planning to drive to Tallahassee to go birding with her aunt, Jamie suggests a road trip.

Jamie explains to Marian – and the audience – the concept of drive-away cars. You find someone who needs to get a car and its contents from one place to another. You pick up and drop off the car and get it at a discount price. Marian looks unconvinced, but Jamie is not the sort of person who takes “No” for an answer. It isn’t long before they’re at a car hiring company run by the taciturn Curlie, picking up a car to Tallahassee.

Of course, the car has been already booked by a Bad Man and his hired goons. Of course, Jamie and Marian know nothing of this. Of course they delay their journey as Jamie stops off at lesbian bars away from the Insterstate, trying to get Marian laid. And of course at least one of these stops is going to be a sleepover with a lesbian football team. These are just some aspects of the screwball comedy that we’ve paid to see. Stop moaning, just get with the programme.

Some time along the journey, Jamie and Marian have a puncture and find the metal suitcase in the boot with no combination lock set. To find out what’s in there, you’ll have to watch the film and wait for the uncredited cameo by Miley Cyrus. They also find a severed head which is never really explained. This is the sort of film which drops in unexplained severed heads for the fun of it. Did I mention that it’s written and directed by a Coen brother and his lesbian wife?

Drive-Away Dolls has received a lot of negative reaction from critics who are not prepared to meet it halfway. It is a trivial comedy. It is fun. It is not supposed to mean much. There’s nothing that I can say to persuade the haters that they should enjoy this film. It is supposed to be funny. If you don’t laugh, that’s your personal decision/reaction. But don’t expect the rest of us to accept your dour dismissal that most of Drive-Away Dolls is not often hilarious.

It is as if the Coen Brothers are fucking with us. After they apparently split up, one brother, Joel, made the ultra-serious The Tragedy of Macbeth. It is a superb film which gains at least part of its power in being unlike many of the dizzy-headed fripperies which the Coens often churned out. It’s not that I didn’t like the fripperies, but this was something with much greater depth. But now Ethan comes out with a film which revels in it just such a glib sense of fun.

Some critics who should know better have pushed the theory that Joel was the talented one. While Joel was wanting to create Shakespearian tragedy, he was being held back by his silly younger brother who just wanted to play it for laughs. My first answer to this is to say that the laughs – both here, and in the Coen’s previous films – are well worth the visit. And secondly, if all you want is Shakespearean grandeur, and no cheap dildo jokes, then your horizons are too limited.

More to the point, maybe, all accounts of the working methods of the Coen brothers testify to the fact that they work together. So, they are both serious and silly. They were both equally able to produce both The Tragedy of Macbeth and Drive-Away Dolls. But the main point is, both films are great. One should and must be allowed to enjoy both Denzel Washington regretting the finite nature of time and Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan just pissing around.

Most of the highest abuse against Drive-Away Dolls seems to be coming from critics who want films to be serious, but end up making do with earnest biopics like Maestro and Oppenheimer. In interviews, Ethan Coen has made clear that he’s not playing this game: “There’s an underserved audience for unimportant movies, is our belief. God. Don’t you want to go to a movie?” Just when did going out to the cinema stop being fun?

I don’t want to make claims that I can’t deliver. Drive-Away Dolls is good but its not great. It’s silly without being laugh-out loud for most of the time. Most of the jokes are funny-ish. The best motivation to see it are some of the sour-faced reviews which fail to see any of the fun. This is a ride of a movie which you should enjoy from beginning to end. Is it the funniest film ever? Far from it, but it passes away the time until that film arrives. Enjoy it, and stop being so po-faced.