‘Drive-Away Dolls’ Is An Obscenely Funny Delight (Review)
24.02.2024 - 19:11
/ metroweekly.com
Hail, Caesar!, the Coens’ last proper comedy. After that, they made the Western anthology film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, then went their separate ways.Joel went full Shakespeare in 2021 with The Tragedy of Macbeth, an expressionistic exercise that was never quite more than the sum of its parts, while his brother took a hiatus from narrative filmmaking.
Rumors swirled that the younger Coen “didn’t want to make movies anymore.”Given those worrying headlines, Drive-Away Dolls feels like a gift from gay heaven. Dolls — which Ethan Coen directed from a script he wrote with his wife, longtime editor Tricia Cooke — is an outlandish lesbian road comedy loaded with madcap dialogue, inky-black humor, bumbling criminals, quirked-up regional accents, distinctive visual flourishes, and other Coen-coded hallmarks we’ve sorely missed.
It’s an obscenely funny, and sometimes just plain obscene, delight.The film is billed as Coen’s solo directorial debut, though that phrase requires some caveats. 1) It’s actually his narrative debut, following a Jerry Lee Lewis documentary.
2) By Coen’s own admission, Cooke served as co-director, but, because of Guild restrictions, is not credited as such.Her involvement is crucial here, because she brings to Drive-Away Dolls an intimate knowledge of “dyke bars,” lesbian situationships, and all-girl slumber parties. (Cooke is a queer woman; she and Coen apparently have an open marriage; and the film’s intended title was “Drive-Away Dykes.”)The story centers on two young lesbians — close friends, though not a couple — living in Philadelphia at the end of the ’90s, an age of Y2K puns and Ralph Nader jokes.