Review: A Day Late and a Dick Short
Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s ‘Drive Away Dolls’ is more loopy-doopy than hippy-dippy
The Yearning Rating: ✰✰✰
Romance: ✰✰✰
Sex: ✰✰✰✰
Storytelling: ✰✰
Performance: ✰✰
Yearning: ✰✰✰✰
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Some spoilers ahead ;)
Written by Ali Romig
When it comes to film, saying something had “potential” feels like a searing indictment rather than a casual comment. It takes a lot of work to make a movie, and if after all that effort, the best compliment someone can bestow upon the fruits of your labor is that it’s “almost good”—well, that’s a bummer! Unfortunately, Drive Away Dolls is one of those “almost good” movies. Despite myriad bits with gag-worthy promise, the movie never—to use a bad, but thematically appropriate pun—arrives at its intended destination.
Drive Away Dolls is based on a screenplay that Ethan Coen wrote with his wife and fellow filmmaker Tricia Cooke in the early 2000s, originally titled “Drive Away Dykes” (oh, how I wish they’d kept this title). It draws heavily from experiences that Cooke—who is queer—had in lesbian bars in the 1990s, which is also when the film is set. The plot follows two lesbian friends, Jamie and Marian, as they make their way to Tallahassee in an attempt to escape their mundane lives and repeated patterns of bad behavior. Jamie (Margaret Qualley) is a long-winded playgirl whose propensity for infidelity has finally caught up with her. And Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) is wound up so tight she’s on the constant verge of anal combustion. Her only respite is reading Henry James alone in bed night after night. When Jamie’s girlfriend, Sukie (a very funny Beanie Feldstein) catches her cheating and kicks her out, Jamie decides to skip town. Luckily, Marian just happens to have the same exact plan—intending to go visit her aunt in Florida.
Jamie strongarms Marian into letting her come along, and suggests they take a driveaway deal—a promise to drop their rental at an agreed-upon location in exchange for a free ride. Unfortunately, the rental clerk, Curlie, mistakes them for someone else and gives them a car with hot-button and nefarious items hidden inside. When gangsters (Colman Domingo, Joey Slotnick, C.J. Wilson) arrive and reveal they were the intended car-renters, they set out on a mad dash to catch the dykes before they can discover what’s in the trunk. The film’s fairly straightforward plot is enough to sustain us for its scant 84-minute runtime, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that with a little more care and specificity, this movie could have gone from plodding to something far more refreshingly unconventional and confident.
The thing that really kills me about Drive Away Dolls is that there were tons of distinctly lesbian comedic bits that could’ve landed with so much oomph, but ended up falling flat. The film took on an almost fantastical tone in depicting a nearly endless supply of lesbian bars scattered across the Eastern Seaboard—my personal favorite being the Butter Churn. Miley Cyrus makes a psychedelic cameo as a hippy named Tiffany Plastercaster. And there’s even a basement makeout party hosted by a girls’ college soccer team, soundtracked with Linda Rondstat’s “Blue Bayou” (the inclusion of which felt like a personal attack). These are all clever, funny details! So why wasn’t I laughing all that much? I think the answer lies in the screenplay itself. A lot of the characters felt underwritten, and many of the punchlines were outdated or tired. A joke about “being Democrats” came across as downright corny given our country's current political climate. This may have been the result of adapting a script originally written over twenty years ago, but further updates would’ve only helped things.
As Jamie and Marian continue to head down south (wink-wink), it becomes clear that their dynamic is shifting, rather clunkily, from friends to lovers. But is their budding romance meant to be sincere and charming? Or hapless and ill-advised? It’s here that even the movie seems unsure of itself. Because we don’t know much about Jamie and Marian—for instance, how long they’ve been friends, how they met, how close they are—I felt confused as to whether or not I was supposed to have seen this coming, or even care. Had one or both of them been harboring feelings or was this love affair simply borne from convenience? Pursuing either option could’ve offered plenty of fun lesbian fodder for the film—we all know dykes who have been in long-term yearning situations, and we know just as many who have hooked up with friends for a bit of chaotic fun! Maybe none of these pesky “character details” really matter, but their inclusion would have helped me feel more invested.
It doesn’t help that Qualley and Viswanathan—both dazzling in other ways—have very little onscreen chemistry. Despite featuring numerous, uninhibited sex scenes (which is great!), not one managed to be all that…sexy? Now listen, I get it! This is a comedy, and the sex scenes aren’t necessarily meant to tantalize, but it would’ve been awesome if at least one didn’t feature Qualley making a face like she was being slowly electrocuted. In fact, Qualley made many choices in this film. I applaud both her and Viswanathan for committing to their character quirks, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t find Jamie’s brand of over-the-top Texas twang extremely distracting. Maybe this accent work was a nod to Coen’s Fargo with a Southern twist, but let’s just say…it’s giving Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias.
For me, the highlight of the movie is Beanie Feldstein as Jamie’s scorned ex, Sukie, an aggro-cop whose sole mission is to return Jamie’s yappy dog, Alice B. Tolkien, to her. Feldstein—returning to the screen after a controversial run on Broadway in Funny Girl—brings an energy to the movie that is otherwise lacking. She storms into every scene with a fuck-it attitude and a strong handle on her physical comedy. I was really happy to see her kill it. Other supporting cast also offer fantastic comedic additions, including the inept henchmen played by Slotnick and Wilson who end up bickering about the social nuances of their job while sloppily pursuing the driveaway car.
Despite not loving Drive Away Dolls, its short runtime and fast pace make it pleasant viewing for a rainy afternoon—just don’t expect too much. In the end, this is a neo-noir spoof where the biggest mystery of the film ends up being its characters.
Drive Away Dolls is now playing in theaters everywhere!
The Elephant in the Werkroom
Season 16, Episode 9:
How do we feel about another design challenge? This is the third of the season, and as Q points out, that is the most design challenges in a season since s3 (where there were four). My personal theory? This seems like a group of design-focused queens (Nymphia, Q, Dawn, Sapphira, and even Plane). They’re much stronger seamstresses than they are comedians…so why not highlight that?
That said, in design-heavy episodes, we tend to get a lot of werkroom banter. And in an already werkroom-heavy season, this is starting to feel repetitive. We should have at least had a guest walk through to dish out some advice, just to shake things up a bit!
More time in the werkroom does give us an intimate look at how the queens are getting to each other though. Many side-eye Mhi’ya as she asks Sapphira for help, Nymphia once again plays the deer caught in headlights, and in a sneaky bit of gameplay, we see Dawn get into Plasma’s head…I think Dawn has been a bit of a quiet killer this season. Plane is obviously flashy with her reads, but Dawn has been delivering cutthroat confessionals while maintaining a lower profile.
Finally, we get to the runway, and this was a highlight for me of the season. So many of the queens truly knocked this challenge out of the park and it was fantastic to see the genuine artistry.
With such a high caliber of work, it’s no wonder Mhi’ya and the otherwise high-performing Plasma land in the bottom (Plasma…that look was scary, and not just because of the Morticia hair).
The episode ended with Plasma, who has multiple challenge wins under her belt, sashaying away before both Mhi’ya and Morphine…finally Drag Race managed a shock. But you know what? Mhi’ya killed that lip sync—now Ru just needs to decide whether it’s the lip sync or precedent that matters and stick with it.
