‘Drive-Away Dolls’ is the Campiest, Horniest Movie a Coen Brother Has Ever Made

Wilson Webb / Working Title / Focus Features

The Coen Brothers have never exactly shied away from camp before, having gone broad and zany on Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski and more, but Drive-Away Dolls is still a Looney Tunes cartoon compared even to those, let alone their more serious fare. Dolls is actually Ethan Coen’s first-ever narrative-feature directing credit without his brother and collaborator Joel Coen, and, if using it as fodder for a which-brother-did-what-all-those-years argument is your bag, you might come away assuming that Joel’s function was to be the realism governor. The teachers are gone in Drive-Away Dolls. Anvils bonk heads and Bugs Bunny does genderqueer schemes.

The fact that Joel’s first solo effort was a black-and-white Shakespeare riff (2021’s The Tragedy of MacBeth, starring Denzel Washington) makes for an intriguing, if simplistic read on their partnership. Could it really have been as easy as Cerebral Joel/Goofy Ethan all these years, like a filmmaking Lennon/McCartney? Suddenly, as if they'd planned it this way, it seems easy to split their filmography down the middle, sorting the Joel films from the Ethan films. The Hudsucker Proxy? Ethan film. Miller’s Crossing? Joel film. A Serious Man? Joel. Burn After Reading? Ethan.

In the first scene of Drive-Away Dolls, a character gets stabbed in the neck with a wine key and tries to remove it by twisting the screw, as if removing a cork. Ethan isn’t easing us into anything here; it’s more like a baptism by (camp)fire. Yet where Drive-Away Dolls is a notch dumber and goofier than just about anything a Coen has done before, that signature Coen flair for language and knack for sight gags resets the hook every time the goof-o-meter approaches not-my-cup-of-tea levels. The stakes are low, but the sense of glee is contagious.

It’s also the horniest Coen film by a mile. Margaret Qualley plays Jamie, a loquacious Texan with an accent so over-the-top it would’ve gotten her laughed off the set of Varsity Blues; it feels like Coen asked Qualley to study Nicolas Cage in Raising Arizona and told her “I don’t want to see any acting more understated than this.”

Jamie is introduced eyebrows deep in a busty woman’s crotch, pausing mid-cunnilingus to field a phone call from Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan, the Indian-Australian 28-year-old with breakout roles in Blockers and Bad Education.) Marian says she needs to “get away,” and wants to visit her aunt in Tallahassee. Jamie wants to tag along and suggests a “drive away”—a business model that lets you have a free road trip in exchange for helping someone transport a car. Marian agrees to meet Jamie at the local lesbian bar, where Jamie is hosting a body-shot competition that night, to discuss further.

Conservative Marian shows up to the meat market bar dressed like a Mormon typist from the fifties, while the ever-braless Jamie’s flirtatious, femme-philandering ways get her punched out onstage by her jealous girlfriend, Suki, played by Beanie Feldstein (Booksmart.) The breakup only provides further motivation for Jamie and Marian to embark upon a classic odd-couple road trip, with horndog Jamie on a side mission to break Marian out of her conservative shell and get her laid, all during a wild, woolly journey from Philadelphia to Tallahassee in 1999.

Applying the American Pie/40-Year-Old Virgin formula to lesbian protagonists isn’t entirely new— Feldstein's breakthrough Booksmart did it, kind of. But Coen and his co-writer Tricia Cooke seem admirably determined to de-intellectualize it further (Cooke, who’s also Coen’s wife and an editor on many of the Coen brothers’ films, is openly queer—the two both have other partners). There’s a Green Book angle to the two lesbians traveling through the conservative south at the tail end of the Family Values era, as well as a Dumb and Dumber angle, with two bad guys (Joey Slotnick and CJ Wilson) hot on their tail the whole way. Jamie and Marian have inadvertently driven off with something the goons want. What could it be? The always-great Bill Camp also gets a nice turn as Curlie, the proprietor of the drive-away business.

All the while, there are stylized transition sequences (think “Gutter Balls” from Lebowski minus the narrative justification) featuring hippie psychedelia and a soft focus Miley Cyrus, along with non-stop sight gags involving dildos (George Clooney’s sex chair from Burn After Reading comes to mind). How these fit in don’t become clear until much later in the story, but without spoiling too much, it’s a plot that seems to have been inspired by famous rock groupie Cynthia Plaster Caster, who made molds of celebrities’ penises in the sixties and seventies.

From dick jokes to comically precise dialogue (think “Edwina’s insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase” from Raising Arizona), Drive-Away Dolls is full of the Coen Brothers’ (or maybe just Ethan’s) signature obsessions. An under-discussed theme in The Big Lebowski is the way the free spirits and counterculture radicals of the Swingin’ Sixties became the proverbial “adults in the room” during Bill Clinton’s corporate, third-way neoliberal 1990s (with The Dude and Walter representing two opposing yet complementary poles, the rock-n’-roller who burned out and the one who became a reactionary, respectively). Drive-Away Dolls pits Matt Damon as a Republican U.S. senator trying to forget his participation in the sexual revolution against two '90s lesbian beneficiaries of it who threaten to dredge up his past, more by their very existence than through any conscious decision.

But the cultural analysis built into Drive-Away Dolls is buried, not necesariy in a bad way, beneath layers of campy dialogue and zany action. It competes with Ladykillers and Hudsucker Proxy for the title of the Coens’ lowest-stakes romp. Qualley and Feldstein’s performances are a lot, and there is a faint whiff of liberal smugness not generally present in the Coens’ other movies. I could’ve also done without Miley Cyrus, but that’s probably a “me” thing.

Mostly though, Drive-Away Dolls is a breezy way to spend 84 minutes, and God bless them for even releasing an 84-minute comedy in the first place. We could use more sub-90 minute romps. The gags are broad and the actors are mostly doing theater-kid fun time, but the jokes mostly land, and there is just enough material that a deeper read is possible—though it’s by no means necessary.

Originally Appeared on GQ