Drive Away Dolls

Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan

Ethan Cohen's Drive Away Dolls is a collaboration with his queer missus, Tricia Cooke, who co-wrote and edited the picture. Despite the film's sapphic veneer, the film is not all that different, for better or worse, than the lesser comedies Ethan has crafted with his brother, Joel. Drive Away Dolls is a screwball, road based romantic black comedy with Margaret Qualley playing the screwball. We meet Qualley's character, Jamie, when she is in the process of cheating on her Philadelphia cop girlfriend, Sukie (Beanie Feldstein). Dumped by the aggrieved Sukie, Jamie resolves to go on a road trip in an attempt to strike another match and start anew. She enlists her buttoned down friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) for the journey, ostensibly to visit relatives in Tallahassee.

As soon as their journey begins, the viewer is pretty sure how it will end. The uninhibited Jamie will loosen Marian up and, as soon as Marian shakes her hair out of its pony tail, Jamie will take notice, quit her womanizing ways, and find true love with her companion. The complimentary, butch/femme duality is spelled out in their names: the androgenous Jamie and (Maid) Marian. Qualley is a hoot, adept with her character's rapid fire dialogue. Viswanathan has little to except to don the mask of repression.

Little does the distaff duo know, but their drive away vehicle contains not one, but two sought after MacGuffins. A parallel duo of male stooges is tasked with tracking down our heroines and securing the hidden and precious cargo. Their journey drives this duo apart as it brings the other two together. Unfortunately, the stooges are much less pungent and memorable than the ones played by Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare in Fargo and the bickering between the two is not compelling or amusing.

Similarly, the opportunity to satirize roadside Americana, as in Demme's Something Wild, is never seized upon. The film's production design and costumes are first rate, but hilarity is never unleashed. The broad, cartoonish character strokes are as much in evidence as in the Cohen brothers' other, lesser films and are equally wearisome. I liked the performances of Ms. Feldstein and Bill Camp and even dug the psychedelic flashbacks than concern the back story of one of the MacGuffins, but found the film to be, overall, thin gruel. Better than The Ladykillers, but not even as good as The Hudsucker Proxy, then.