We’re coming up on nearly two years since I first started my “Summer of the Coen Brothers” marathon, where I intended to watch every one of the familial pair’s films over the course of Summer 2022. And to be fair, I almost made it! Starting with Blood Simple in May and going in mostly chronological order until I skipped over The Big Lebowski (on account of having seen it at least a hundred times already – although I circled back, don’t worry), I was moving at a pretty good clip. Then we skipped over a rewatch of No Country for Old Men to accommodate one of my friends’ schedules, and other than that one, we finished up in December of 2022, with the only outstanding unseen film in their oeuvre being 2021’s Tragedy of Macbeth. “But wait!” I hear you say. “That was a solo project for Joel! That doesn’t count!” And you might be right, but with my screening of that one still pending, I can’t speak for how much of the Coens-ness of the duo is present in it. I can say that it’s present in Ethan’s new project Drive-Away Dolls, although there is an air of … incompleteness about it. 

It’s 1999, almost 2000, and you can tell by the fact that lesbian bars still exist. Our two leads are Texas gal Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and her friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), both of whom are of the sapphic persuasion. Like most classic Coen-penned duos, they are a study in reflections and symmetries; Jamie is the drawling, energetic, oversexed libertine to Marian’s frumpily-dressed, hasn’t-been-laid-in-years bookworm. When Jamie gets kicked out for cheating by her girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), Marian puts her up, but only briefly, as she herself is traveling to Florida to visit an elderly relative and do some birding. Jamie convinces Marian to let her come along, noting that they can get a free car via a “drive away” service. I’ve never heard of this, but it apparently involves delivering an assigned vehicle to an assigned destination. I’m not sure if this service still exists or if it ever did; it’s hard to believe it would, but I imagine people who only know AirBnB learning about Couchsurfing would be similarly incredulous, so I’ll keep an open mind. Unbeknownst to them, as a result of a mix-up at the office of a surly man named Curlie (Bill Camp), the car that they are selected to transport was supposed to deliver certain extralegal goods. And, since duos are a Coen specialty, we get another one whose role is to pursue the other: two “heavies,” one a brutish, monosyllabic goon named Flint (C.J. Wilson) and the other a self-assured wannabe smooth-talker called Arliss (Joey Slotnick). They report up to a man known only as “The Chief” (Colman Domingo), who finds himself in deep trouble with a disembodied voice demanding better from the other end of the phone. 

I didn’t love this one, I’m afraid. I liked it; I liked it plenty, in fact. But there is something that’s just not quite whole about it. There are a lot of images and concepts that line up in an unexpected way at the end, which I always enjoy in a Coen production, the way the puzzle falls into place perfectly. For instance, there are several faux-80mm “groovy” psychedelic sequences that initially seem to serve as out-of-place scene transitions, but which ultimately relate to the overall plot since (spoilers), the Macguffin that the women are carrying turns out to be a case full of dildos molded by a hippie woman named Tiffany Plastercaster (Miley Cyrus) from her lovers, several of which have risen to positions of prominence and power in the intervening time. My favorite of these moments, however, comes in the form of a few dreams Marian has about her childhood, in which she had a crush on the woman next door who sunbathed in the nude, and the focus that her memories have on the neighbor’s footwear: cowboy boots, like Jamie’s. This folding back upon itself that the film does, which creates a new interpretation of what we’ve already seen and functionally bookends the plot, is complete in itself as a sum of its parts, but is still somehow lacking in transcending that arithmetic. 

I enjoyed the many references to Henry James. Throughout, Marian is seen reading The Europeans, which leads into a discussion between her and Jamie about The Portrait of a Lady, which Jamie cites as the English class assignment that turned her off of reading forever. Still later, The Chief is also reading a James novel (although I missed which one it was), and the film reveals its true title, Henry James’s Drive-Away Dykes, right before the end credits. In truth, however, the author that I couldn’t stop thinking about was Tom Robbins. There’s a real kinetic energy to Dolls at certain points, verging on the positively zany. A similar zaniness is a recurring element in Robbins’s work, and there’s just something about lesbian cowboys in the 1970s that makes it almost entirely impossible to put up a barrier in your mind between this work and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. 

“But wait!” I hear you say—how do you keep doing that?—“But wait, did you say ‘1970s?’ I thought you said it was 1999.” And you’re right! I did say that! But the overall aesthetic of Dolls is very aligned with the 70s, and it’s apparent that the film would be set in that decade were it not for the need for our very out, very lesbian leads to be able to walk around with almost no overt bigotry (they deal with less than they would have in the real world in 1999, or now, for that matter), and because the film wants to take a few namby-pamby, weak-fisted potshots at “traditionalist” reactionaries. Jamie looks like she stepped out of the past, while Marian’s work outfit features the kind of ribbon tie you see in office photos of yesteryear. When the two of them go to a “basement party” with a team of lesbian college athletes, their group rotating makeout session is not only timed out based on the A- and B-sides of a vinyl record, but the album in question is Linda Ronstadt’s Hasten Down the Wind, released in 1976. I think this movie would be more fun if it ripped off the band-aid and went full 1970s period piece. Although that wouldn’t line up with the timeline of the film’s villain having his dick duplicated during the lava lamp days, I don’t think that’s what really stopped them. 

It’s mostly a set-up so that the film can end with a newspaper headline that reveals that a Republican senator was shot outside of a lesbian bar carrying a suitcase full of dildos—haw haw—more than it is any kind of insightful or thoughtful satire. The scene in the trailer in which Marian and Jamie are asked what kind of people they are and proudly respond “We’re Democrats!” is just as awkward in the film proper. That neoliberal wishy-washiness is what makes Dolls feel like an artifact of the past, more than the near-Y2K setting, the 1970s aesthetic, or anything else. There are moments when the cartooniness works, like when Jamie and Marian start screaming when Flint and Arliss finally catch up to them, complete with zooms around the room that call to mind Raising Arizona and Crimewave, but then there are nearly as many others where that tone feels awkward and out of date. For instance, the scene where Sukie is tearfully struggling with an electric screwdriver while attempting to unmount a wall-mounted dildo, so sloppily that it’s stripping the screws, flip-flopping between rage and regret? Funny. Her punching Jamie in the face in front of a bar full of people the first time that she sees her after finding out she cheated? Not funny, and it’s made even less so by the fact that Sukie is a cop, one we’re supposed to find funny for abusing her power (a scene in which she “comedically” refuses to let an inmate see his lawyer is particularly unamusing), and whose trigger-happiness saves the day at the end. Some of it is as funny as it possibly can be, with her easy handling of Arliss and Flint when they come to her place looking for Jamie being a real standout of physical comedy, but that’s on Feldstein and her performance, and not the character as written on the page. In contrast, the character of Curlie is perfectly funny all the way through, from his insistence that Jamie not call him by his name because it’s “too familiar” to the scene where he is unable to call for help and muses aloud, “Who will save Curlie?” He’s used just enough to not become tiresome, and is a real example of the kind of richly funny “regular fellers” that permeate the landscape of the Coen tapestry, and is one of the characters that the movie is doing just right. 
The others, however, often feel flat, and there’s a real “Democrats-kneeling-in-kente-cloth / Ruthkanda forever” energy to it that undercuts what could otherwise be a more radical piece of queer art. Like Desert Hearts, it’s unusually satisfying to see WLW sexual activity as both (a) fun and (b) not for the straight male gaze. However, I’m torn about the treatment of the “Black church lady in a big hat” archetype at the end, as we finally meet Mairan’s aunt and Jamie gloats to her that the two of them are going to Massachusetts because women can get married there. On the one hand, in part, liberation means not having to pussyfoot (sorry) around one’s sexuality and identity to appease another person’s bigotry; on the other, that the filmmakers chose to end the movie on this scene specifically so we can all (presumably) laugh at a white lesbian woman making an older Black church lady uncomfortable is a choice that calls to mind the poor handling of race in The Ladykillers. I’m less torn about the scene in which the soccer team sends Flint and Arliss on a wild goose chase that ends with them in an Alabama juke joint, where the joke of the scene is that the two goons are unable to interpret the supposedly unintelligible dialogue of an older Black man. It’s got a real Trump-era SNL liberalism to it, is what I’m saying, and it clearly wants to be more radical than it is but is hampered by—to put it frankly—an older generation’s idea of liberation, and that seventeen-year idea-to-release window certainly isn’t doing it any favors. There’s a lot to enjoy and enough laughs to make it worthwhile, but it won’t be anybody’s favorite Coen project, as it feels primed to age like mayo in the sun.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond