Coen Watch: Drive-Away Dolls (2024)

Watched:  07/25/2025

Format:  Peacock

Viewing:  First

Director:  Ethan Coen

Is anything more telling about what the Coen Bros. each brought to their team than that when the brothers decided to do independent projects, Joel Coen made a mannered and styled Macbeth and Ethan Coen made Drive-Away Dolls (2024)?  

The mix of high-brow and low-brow - even Raising Arizona has thematic and nigh-poetic aspirations - was their hallmark, with ultra-specific characters, absurdist humor, and deeply human stories - culminating in the excellence of their track record over years and movies that had a stamp audiences recognized and sought out.  

I was vaguely aware Drive-Away Dolls received very mixed reviews, and audiences were kind of irritated with it.  

Which, no kidding.  The movie isn't overly concerned with good taste or your politics or the horseshoe turn lefties online took into agreeing with the Catholic League about how movies are for perverts if they acknowledge sex and show blood with violence.  Instead, this flick is an old-fashioned pulp crime comedy with a heavy layering of what turns out to be the sense of oddball humor that the Coens always brought, that apparently was Ethan Coen's contribution.

The movie is essentially about two young women who are part of the queer community in Philadelphia in the mid-1990's, who, after Jamie (Margaret Qualley) breaks up with her girlfriend (Beanie Feldstein reminding you she's kinda great) hits the road with her platonic friend, Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan - from Thunderbolts) to deliver a car from Philly to Tallahassee - a real service then and now.  Unbeknownst to them, they've accidentally taken a car carrying a package or two intended for transportation by the agents of a local crime boss (Coleman Domingo in perfect form). 

There's some hilarious interstitials that take a while to sort out, side-quests, etc...  and two gangsters constantly squabbling like an old WB cartoon.  For those looking for a serious crime movie - this isn't it.  And it is, in fact, really a romantic comedy operating as a crime movie.   And because a Coen Brother is involved, is able to get great talent in even small roles.

Qualley's Texas accent is... bad and generically southern without imitating her mother's accent.  But she's funny, and kind of perfect as what she is - an out, open and sexually voracious person with a risk tolerance that broke and fell into the sea.  Just as Viswanathan's uptight, intellectual opposite is kind of great, and what could have been prudish and unlikable makes you cheer for her.

Essentially, Drive-Away Dolls is a silly, Rated-R comedy with a lot of flourishes, talky in a 1990's indie-film way, and as uncorked as the character Jamie is supposed to be, just being what it is and not really giving a shit about hitting the polite sensibilities we're already forgetting pervaded film discourse for most of a decade.  I think what's funny is that this movie would have done just fine back in the 1990's, maybe been a bit of an indie-cinema hit.  It's not at the levels of greatness that the Coens did together for a few decades, but it it's funny, has a perspective and a particular style, and that's not something I think I can get in a movie very often in the 2020's.

If Ethan Coen wants to spend this part of his career making ridiculous movies like this, and I mean that in the best way, then... cool.  I'm all for it.  

In the end, I think this movie is going to survive for decades, like so many other Coen Bros. projects, while so much other stuff we think is great now gets left on the VHS shelf of memory.  If a movie is about making you feel something in particular - and this one had me cackling - then this one succeeds.  When was the last time a movie had actually snappy dialogue or felt genuinely quotable?  Or had hitmen that you were going to remember beyond bald and vaguely Eastern European in leather jackets?

Is it is as good as Fargo?  Big Lebowski?  No.  But it was an ideal Friday night watch.