Well. Where to start? Ethan Coen’s second feature without his bro, Joel, is a bit of an oddity. Drive-Away Dolls is a lesbian road/caper/crime comedy – not that that that is a bad thing, but it seems too have something of an identity crisis.
Coen directs, but the screenplay was written jointly with his wife, Tricia Cooke, who has worked as an editor or associate editor on many of the Coen brothers’ films.
This is one case where I’m going to mention people’s personal lives, because the couple are quite open about this and it seems relevant to the film.
Cooke and Coen have two children, but she identifies as lesbian and queer, and describes her marriage as “non-traditional”. They both have other partners.
The point being that this is not some some sort of straight riff on lesbian lives.
Bu back to the film. It’s Philadelphia in 1999. After permissive Jamie is kicked out of her relationship with cop Sukie, she learns that her up-tight friend Marian is planning a trip to Tallahassee, Florida, to visit a relative and enjoy some birdwatching, and decides they should make the trip together.
They use a drive-away car company (where someone can transport a car one-way for another client). However, a misunderstanding means they get the wrong car – with an intriguing cargo.
When the bunch of crooks who had booked the car finds out, they set off in murderous chase.
It’s so hit and miss. It seems like a very deliberate attempt to come up with the trashiest, most lesbo-exploitation flick you could – and perhaps that’s a positive finger to the state of lesbian representation on screen? But yet the film feels conflicted.
There are some very good moments.
Flashback sequences of Marian starting to explore her sexuality are spot on. But a series of psychedelic interludes, which have no explanation until very, very late on, are annoying. And while it’s genuinely funny in places, it’s not laugh-out-loud funny in the same way that it seems to want to be.
It actually has a great core message – that horny women who shag other horny woman are fine!
But problems aside, Geraldine Viswanathan as Marian is really fantastic, bringing a sense of genuine nuance to a generally unsubtle film. Margaret Qualley, as Jamie, gives it her all, but I do wonder about the accent a bit.
Beanie Feldstein is great as the cuckolded girlfriend and cop.
There is a tiny cameo here for Pedro Pascal, a slightly larger one for Matt Damon, and a bigger role for Colman Domingo, all of whom give of their best. Joey Slotnjick as one of the gangsters is very good.
So very much a mixed bag. But while the film itself is more than a tad all over the place, it's most certainly good to see lesbians being represented in such morally non-judgemental – indeed, in such positive ways.
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