Coen Lite ‘Drive Away Dolls’, a lezploitation noir comedy, delivers some partial Coen Brothers goods to Florida Drive Away Dolls, a fun, raunchy noir lezploitation comedy directed by Ethan Coen and co-written by Coen and Tricia Cooke, is so short it feels like half a movie. I shouldn’t be complaining about that; movies these days are mostly far too long. But Drive Away Dolls, despite some hilarious and sexy moments, feels more like a series of sketches around Coen Brothers themes. For once, I wanted a movie to be longer. DRIVE AWAY DOLLS ★★★ (3/5 stars) Directed by: Ethan Coen Written by: Ethan Coen, Tricia Cooke Starring: Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, Beanie Feldstein, Colman Domingo, Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal Running time: 84 mins It’s been six years since the last Coen Brothers movie, the incredible Netflix anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and eight years since their last theatrical release, the Hollywood satire Hail, Caesar! Joel Coen made a version of MacBeth that was about as funny as a funeral, so Drive Away Dolls is really the closest thing we’ve seen to a Coen Brothers movie this decade. In style and vibe, it most closely resembles Raising Arizona, in its shaggy approach toward sex and violence. But it also contains the most lesbians we’ve seen in a movie in a long time, if not ever. The always welcome Margaret Qualley, playing a horny free spirited Texas dyke named Jamie, has the showiest part, and she’s hilariously goofy throughout. But the movie really serves as a Hollywood coming-out party for the Australian actor Geraldine Viswanathan, playing a semi-repressed office worker named Marian, who would rather read Henry James novels in a hotel room while Jamie makes out with randos at skeezy roadhouse lesbian bars. They are both extremely watchable for people of all preferences, and they have a lovely, believable chemistry. For very thin plot reasons, Jamie and Marion end up hiring a “drive away” car in Philadelphia to take down to Tallahassee. In an extraordinary coincidence, they end up with the wrong car, which some questionable semi-mobsters were supposed to take instead, with a mysterious cargo hidden in the wheel well. Without that coincidence, we wouldn’t have a story, so it’s really a detriment that Jamie and Marion don’t find the package until nearly 50 minutes into an 84-minute runtime. Meanwhile, they slowly noodle down the road, hooking up with various gals and maybe with each other. While endless scenes of girls macking on each other are welcome to all but the most repressed among us, there’s no reason for it to happen other than to show Marion loosening up a little bit. When we finally do get to the reason for all this nonsense, Coen and Cooke have to pack a lot into the last half-hour. The payoff is funny, but the pacing is way off. Pedro Pascal and Matt Damon are in the cast, but don’t expect to see much of them. Colman Domingo appears in a few scenes as a henchman. And Beanie Feldstein pops in and out as a Philadelphia cop who also is Qualley’s ex, but she’s more of a lesbian deus ex machina than an actual character. You could say this entire movie is a lesbian deus ex machina, really, just an excuse to show the hottest queer relationship on screen since Bound. For that reason alone, it’s going to have a cult following, but there’s not a lot of movie to surround the cult, and the movie that does exist is really only about 40 minutes long. That said, if you need a quick dose of Coen Brothers lite, Drive Away Dolls contains enough fun fisheye camera moments, wacky throwaway lines, and blood-soaked goofy moments to at least merit an inclusion in a career retrospective clip montage. And you’ve never seen so many dildos in all your damn life. It’s no “son, you’ve got a panty on your head,” but this screwball noir tribute to ladies who love ladies will do until the brothers reunite.
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