The whole point of my doing the “One Thing I Like” thing is to try1With limited success to prevent my natural tendency to write thousands of words to sum up everything a movie is about, which is ultimately unnecessary because that’s what the movie is for.
But it turns out that Drive-Away Dolls is perfectly suited for this format. Because there’s quite a bit of stuff to like in it, even though the movie as a whole didn’t really work for me. Occasionally to the point of making me uncomfortable.
Not in the ways that it’s probably supposed to make me uncomfortable, inventing a new genre of Lesbian Slapstick Neo-Noir Rom-Com.2I’m assuming “inventing.” I probably shouldn’t assume, and just say that it’s something I haven’t seen before. It’s not all the dildos and oral sex that made me cringe, although it did at times seem like it was trying too hard to push the uptight normies out of their comfort zones. Instead, it was the slapstick.
Pedro Pascal gets pretty high billing in the movie, even though he’s only in one scene3At least, intact. right at the beginning. In that scene, he’s really playing up the “fey, skittish, weirdo completely out of his element” angle, and he does it well enough that you can read all of those ideas even from limited screen time and a few lines of dialogue, mostly from his mannerisms. But it’s frustrating, because he’s playing it like he’s in a screwball comedy, and it feels like the right choice, and it feels like the other characters are making the right choices, but none of it really works together.
That’s true throughout. I’m reluctant to make a point of the fact that it was directed and co-written by Ethan Coen, because that’s kind of lazy, and it doesn’t seem fair to compare a movie to the filmmakers’ other work instead of considering it on its own merits. But there’s just no getting around it: this feels like someone trying to assemble a Coen Brothers movie, and they’ve got all the necessary components, but somehow they’ve lost the instructions.
There are flashes here and there. Like when Curlie is lying beaten on the floor of his office, papers falling onto his face, and he laments, “Won’t anybody save Curlie?”
And Beanie Feldstein’s character of a perpetually (and justifiably) angry cop. She just seems to understand exactly the kind of movie she’s in, and she hits the right level throughout.
But the standout for me was, unsurprisingly, Margaret Qualley’s performance. “Unsurprisingly” because I just think she’s great, and she repeatedly throws herself completely into projects that she thinks are cool4Find an account of all the stuff she had to do for Monstro Elisasue The Substance!, even though she honestly could get away with a lot less effort just coasting on her own natural charisma.
In Drive-Away Dolls, she has to play what is essentially a cartoon, a chaotic and chaotically sex-positive free spirit who talks a lot and says everything and anything that is on her mind. It’s meant to contrast her against her more uptight and repressed friend — and again, Geraldine Viswanathan makes the right choices, but is stuck with being more or less the straight man (extremely ironically). Qualley’s character seems to exist entirely on the surface, with nothing to ground her and nothing to suggest layers.
But there’s one scene while the two of them are driving, and a conversation about the work of Henry James and a graphic description of cunnilingus turns into her having to acknowledge that she was careless and to apologize.
It’s not that it’s a particularly deep scene; the movie itself isn’t that deep. It tosses out a lot of ideas about repression and authenticity and performative morality, mocking hypocritical Republican identity politics in a way that’s not just unsubtle but explicit. But the scene’s interesting because it’s the first indication we get that Qualley’s character Jamie doesn’t actually say everything that’s on her mind, that there is a person underneath the cartoon.
I feel like I know at this point how to “read” a Coen Brothers movie, and a lot of that same language is in this movie. Characters are either cartoonishly over-the-top, or comically reserved and under-played, and the humor comes from seeing the extremes play off against each other. It’s rare to see a performance that manages to be both cartoonish and (relatively) understated in the same scene.
I watched this movie in anticipation of seeing Honey Don’t, which seems to be another case of Qualley throwing herself completely into a noir comedy from Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke. (According to the internet, it’s the second film in a planned trilogy?) Even though Drive-Away Dolls didn’t totally work for me, I’m still on board. Seeing all the right components can still be fun and interesting, even when they don’t quite come together.
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