When two, twenty-something, lesbian friends decide to take a road trip from Philadelphia to Tallahassee, they get to unwind, make some new friends and toss back a few drinks. But when the girls' rental car is meant for a pair of gangsters instead of them, the road trip gets dangerous. This film is Drive-Away Dolls and is directed by Oscar winner Ethan Cohen (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, 2018). With plenty of sex, bickering dialogue between annoyed friends, and deadpan line deliveries, Drive-Away Dolls is a quirky comedy with a touch of action. It clearly has the same off beat comedic vibe of past Cohen films like The Big Lebowski (1998) and Burn After Reading (2008).
While watching this film in the theater (by myself) I thought, "It's so nice to see a female-centered, queer comedy that's sex-positive with a casually frolicsome attitude. So why am I feeling so bored?" From beginning to end, I watched this feeling mildly interested...but not entertained. The film is set in 1999 for no apparent reason. It has a few interludes of psychedelic kaleidoscopes of color with a pretty flower child swaying her body (surprise, this flower child is Miley Cyrus). These interludes have nothing to do with the film's plot or the characters' desires. The punchlines are written clearly, but none of them are original enough to be actually funny, and none of them are acted with any notable energy.
The original screenplay is co-written by director Ethan Cohen and his wife Tricia Cooke who is an experienced film editor and producer. Isn't it nice when married couples can work together in harmony to create something so bland and tedious? The three main characters have nothing to do but play the same respective notes the entire time. Margaret Qualley (Maid, 2021) is the free-spirited Jamie with a loud appetite for adventure and an even louder appetite for women. Geraldine Viswanathan (7 Days, 2021) plays Jamie's prudent friend Marian who is too uptight to enjoy anything. And Beanie Feldstein (The Humans, 2021) plays a grumpy cop who is mad at everyone.
None of these actresses bother to play more than their one note....except maybe when two of them have shower sex with each other in a hotel room. This sex happens after the two road trippers discover a briefcase of high-profile sex toys in the trunk of their rented car. What a riot!
The screenplay has so little content, it can't even fill a 90-minute runtime. Drive Away Dolls is one hour and 24 minutes, but it felt so much longer. That's a bad sign when you lose all concepts of recorded time while watching a short film. I'm not happy to be dragging this film and using every negative adjective I can think of. I'm feeling too disappointed to find joy in anything right now.
Drive-Away Dolls is not so much a complete disaster as it is a giant missed opportunity. This film is the first directed by Ethan Cohen without any involvement from his older brother Joel. Both brothers achieved critical acclaim and Oscar glory with their films Fargo (1997) and No Country for Old Men (2008). Let's hope Ethan Cohen's next solo director project is more successful, more developed, and more well-rounded than this one.
