Grade: C
Drive-Away Dolls is a runaway train of Coeny silliness. Director Ethan Coen is working alone here, after decades of collaborating with his brother Joel on Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Barton Fink, and many more. I don’t know if the movie suffers BECAUSE he didn’t have a partner to tell him when something isn’t good, or if it was a half-baked idea anyway. Either way, after being one of my most anticipated films of the season, Drive-Away Dolls is a disappointment.
Our two leads are Margaret Qualley (Poor Things, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood) and Geraldine Viswanathan. They are both terrific performers, but Qualley in particular seems to be doing a feature-length video audition. “Is she going to talk like that the whole movie?” – I asked myself when she started speaking. Yes. Yes she is. The Coens like to have leading ladies with big, exaggerated accents (think Frances McDormand in Fargo), and Qualley has a cartoonish cutesy Southern cadence which sounds like she’s about to raise Arizona.
The Qualley character invites herself on a road trip to Tallahassee with Viswanathan, who is going to visit family. Unbeknownst to them, their drive-away car contains a briefcase that a couple of bumbling felons are trying to get back to their rightful owner. This isn’t a Pulp Fiction situation – we do eventually see what’s in the case – but one of the few delights of Drive-Away Dolls is that it feels like it could have been made in 1999, when it’s set. It’s very easy to imagine it among the wave of late 90s hip Miramax flicks, trying to be the next Tarantinian classic. I can envision myself seeing it during that period, and reviewing it unfavorably.
Any potential conflicts or stakes are eschewed in favor of forced overacted jokes, try as the cast might. Beanie Feldstein is always a funny girl, and this is one of her more memorable performances. Bill Camp is so perpetually deadpan and understated – it’s the opposite of his over-the-top hamming-up of the Macbeth monologue in Birdman. Colman Domingo gets a few moments to shine, but Matt Damon is absolutely wasted in a glorified cameo that any actor could have played. I wonder how long he was on set for this. Only the ensemble has fun. The viewer mostly doesn’t.
In the end, Drive-Away Dolls is too out there and goofy for its own good. The humor isn’t earned, and comes off as just an opportunity to hang a bunch of jokes and one-liners on the clothesline, with the plot being an afterthought. Perhaps director Ethan Coen could have used his usual collaborator to bounce ideas off of and make sure everything was working. “O brother, where art thou” indeed.
Grade: C
Film Reviews by Mark 
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