The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison reports falling about watching DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS (Ethan Coen, USA, 2023)

Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, Drive-Away Dolls

I’ve been wondering about Drive-Away Dolls, the movie from the Coen brother who didn’t want to make a black and white Macbeth with Denzel Washington. I noticed a reference to it quite a while back (its credits say 2023) but pretty much the only promotion I’ve seen for its local run is a teaser on the front of a trailer for another movie. That all worked up my curiosity.

What I got was the kind of ferocious bad taste movie you’d expect if someone hired Oliver Stone to re-make The Rocky Horror Picture Show. After an uneasy start, I found myself falling about.

This one is kind of a family affair, one Coen brother writing with his editor wife and directing Andie McDowell’s daughter and Jonah Hill’s sister, to showcase a young woman from Newcastle, New South Wales, called Geraldine Viswanathan who makes a memorably straight faced contribution to all the anarchic stuff. Think Aubrey Plaza without the attitude. She is the required contrast to hard charging Margaret Qualley, teetering on the edge of her stardom. Qualley would have fit right in as a Howard Hawks woman.

It starts off uneasily with Pedro Pascal meeting a grotesque fate in an alley. Attention shifts to girl buddies Qualley and Viswanathan finding themselves at a loose end. Qualley has broken up with her police officer lover Beanie Feldstein, complete with an argument about who gets their wall dildo, while Viswanathan, fresh from her job with Ralph Nader, isn’t all that interested in the Sapphic club scene and plans on joining a birding expedition in Tallahassee, reading her Henry James novels along the way. 

Matt Damon

The ideal mode of transport would be a Driveaway where they take a car to its owner in another city. Turns out that grouchy Bill Camp’s office has a vehicle waiting to be shifted just there – exercise in comic probability. Nobody checks the boot, which turns out to have two suspicious items where the spare tire should be. Eyes widen when that’s unlocked.

Things liven up for Margaret when they stay at the motel where a lesbian soccer team are relaxing with the captain blowing a change partners whistle at half time. Turning down a threesome, Geraldine finds herself spending the night sitting in the office.

Geraldine Viswanathan

Meanwhile comic goons Joey Slotnick and C.J. Wilson discover that their car has been mistakenly dispatched because how likely is it that two sets of customers would want to go to Tallahassee? This sends those rightful owners off in pursuit, which gets one beaten up by Feldstein because he’s old school and doesn’t want to hit a woman and his mate is blindsided when the address the soccer girls he’s charming gives them turns out to be a rough black music barn.

The girls meanwhile are coasting on a suspect credit card and the luxury El Conquistador hotel’s policy of inclusivity - steamy shower scene. Of course paths converge.

Not the least of the delights is the film’s maliciously misapplied film form. Scene transitions come up as the Henry James pages fluttering, contrasting to a psychedelic montage of fluoro coloured pizza fillings. Miley Cyrus gets a psychedelic number and there’s a glimpse of Senator Matt Damon’s mis-spent college days.

Beanie Feldstein

Drive-Away Dolls keeps on playing off audience expectation. It’s an exploitatively sexy film (“at least take off your shirt”) where the only full frontal is a sunbathing bit player. It comes with my all time favourite McGuffin (include monologue about the possibility of an E-Bay sales promotion). They telegraph the introduction of ego-free star Matt Damon with a hoarding of him as the local family values politician. Boy is he going to get it! When the girls confront him, they announce themselves as Democrats.

The pace never slacks with the lesbian frame of reference twisting the familiar situations into something grotesquely fresh. Everyone comes out of it well though it’s not a big budget offering.

I’m sorry they didn’t get about to making this in the nineties the way they planned, when it could conveniently have slid in with the drive-In fare that it burlesques. I would have re-visited it at intervals quite a few times by now. That I would have enjoyed. It’s the highlight of my current viewing.