Ethan Coen's 'Drive-Away Dolls' is a zany, lesbian, sex comedy

A few years ago, when it was announced that filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen were going their separate ways, I know people who took it worse than their own parents’ divorces. The most consistently brilliant double act in modern movies, the Coens have been making screwball meditations on cosmic misfortunes since 1984’s “Blood Simple,” seemingly as a symbiotic unit. The brothers have been known to complete each other’s sentences and often spent entire interviews snort-laughing at their own private jokes. (The only bad thing about Charlie Rose being canceled is that we no longer get to watch him being befuddled by them.) Indeed, the Coens’ saddest and most soulful film, 2013’s “Inside Llewyn Davis,” was about a folk duo that suddenly became a solo act, and in the travails of their sad-sack protagonist, the brothers seemed to be imagining the worst-case scenario of a world without each other.

But even on their own, the Coens have kept it in the family. Joel’s stark 2021 take on “The Tragedy of Macbeth” was a project initiated and produced by his wife Frances McDormand, and despite the grim subject matter, one must admit that’s an objectively hilarious movie to make with your spouse. Now Ethan has stepped behind the camera with his own better half, Tricia Cooke, who has helped cut films for the Coens ever since being hired fresh out of NYU to work as an apprentice editor on their 1990 masterpiece “Miller’s Crossing.” Coen and Cooke originally scripted “Drive-Away Dolls” together some 20 years ago under a similar title that cannot be printed here. It’s a zany, lesbian, sex comedy that’s about as far away from an austere Shakespeare adaptation as you can get. And while forensic auteurism may be a fool’s errand with collaborators as close as the Coens, I nevertheless think we can now tell which brother wrote the dildo joke in 2008’s “Burn After Reading.”

“Drive-Away Dolls” is a filthy, high-spirited farce that presumably sets some sort of record for the number of sex toys featured in a film released by a major studio subsidiary. It’s a profoundly unserious piece of work and I laughed for pretty much the entire 84 minutes, at times aghast. Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan star as Jamie and Marian, a mismatched pair who only seem to be friends because they don’t know that many other gay people. Qualley’s Jaime is the proudly promiscuous chaos agent, jumping into bed with whichever gal at the bar strikes her fancy, given to sidewinding monologues delivered in a chirpy, Texan twang. (The screenplay is full of that classically Coen-y dialogue that sounds like everyone inhaled a thesaurus.) Marian is the buttoned-up good girl who claims she would rather be at home reading Henry James, yet Viswanathan’s droll, deadpan performance signals someone who makes a point of being so staid because she’s always on the verge of losing a battle of wills with her more libidinous longings.

It would take all day to explain exactly how these two wound up on the lam headed for Tallahassee, driving a Dodge Aries containing the personal, um… property of a family values-obsessed Republican senator played by Matt Damon at his most smilingly insincere. (It’s a small role, but the actor’s foursquare white guy-ness has seldom been deployed so efficiently.) Our heroines are being pursued by two hired guns — billed in the credits as “The Goons” — played by Joey Slotnick and C.J. Wilson, who in the time-honored tradition of Coen movie flunkies have some personality issues of their own that will need to be worked out on the road. Mixed up in the chase are Beanie Feldstein as Jamie’s rage-case, police officer ex-girlfriend and Colman Domingo as a sinister fixer who would likewise rather be home reading Henry James. (There’s also a humdinger of an uncredited cameo by Miley Cyrus, and anyone who tells you who she’s playing is not your friend.)

A natural born movie star if I’ve ever seen one, Qualley at first appears to be channeling the sublime self-confidence George Clooney brings to his knucklehead roles in the Coens’ comedies. (She sounds like she’s seen “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” at least a thousand times.) But while Clooney’s nitwits always carry themselves as if they’re the smartest person in the room, the key difference with Jamie is that she often is. Her hare-brained schemes have a funny way of working out for the best, and “Drive-Away Dolls” turns out to be a sweeter, more generous movie than you might be expecting from something so vulgar. The filmmakers clearly really like Jamie and Marian, and the chemistry between Qualley and Viswanathan isn’t just comedic. They’re adorable in a way that’s allowed to get hot. This is a happy, horny movie in which people have sex with each other because it’s fun. I couldn’t help but be reminded of a line from an earlier film Coen and Cooke worked on together, when Julianne Moore’s Maude Lebowski described “coitus, the physical act of love” as “a natural, zesty enterprise.”

The ramshackle plotting lacks the Swiss-watch precision of earlier Coen crime pictures, but the looseness has its rewards. There’s a throwaway quality that adds to the disreputable atmosphere. In mid-February, Coen and Cooke curated a special double feature for Coolidge Corner Theatre members, screening John Waters’ “Female Trouble” and Doris Wishman’s “Bad Girls Go to Hell” as a promotion to prepare potential audiences for “Drive-Away Dolls.” (Alas, their selections seemed to perplex a lot of the after-church crowd, though I must say it was nice for those of us who can no longer stay awake late enough for midnight movies.)

Coen and Cooke’s film aspires to similarly ragged, if less confrontational charms, complete with dodgy scene transitions and psychedelic interludes to be explained later. “Zola” cinematographer Ari Wegner’s plasticky digital video is agreeably cheap-looking but a bad match for the 1999 setting. (The film takes place in the era when it was originally written, I gather because smartphones would derail the entire story.) The surfeit of rubber phalluses in “Drive-Away Dolls” engenders a very funny political reading that it would be cruel for a critic to reveal, but it’s safe to say that Coen and Cooke have found an audacious and enormously gratifying way to repurpose a central symbol of the patriarchy. Like I said, it’s a zesty enterprise.

“Drive-Away Dolls” is now in theaters.